A host of celebrations

It’s been rather a hectic week. Apart from still trying to finish things off at the hotel, 23 April is Children’s Day in Turkey.  It is celebrated everywhere with fantastic dance and gymnastic displays for which the children (and teachers) spend months preparing.  Kaan’s school go even further and organize an International Children’s Dance Festival.

The day was designated Children’s Festival in 1927 with the aim of celebrating children as the future of the nation.  The date is significant because it commemorates the first day the Turkish Grand National Assembly met in 1920 as they struggled to establish the new republic against the Allies who were happily dividing up the land that is now Turkey!  Atatürk, the first Prime Minister of the new Republic, dedicated the date to the children who would be the protectors of its freedom.  The actual name of the holiday is National Sovereignty and Children’s Festival.

To support this, one of the traditions of Children’s Day is for children to take over top official roles for the day and give their ideas and wishes.  It has also always been the aim to make it an international holiday and many children from other countries are invited to take part in the celebrations.

Kaan’s school have about 500 children visiting from 12 countries.  They come from places as diverse as Russia and Indonesia and spend the week being taken out and entertained, as well as entertaining with their dancing.  Last night was the actual competition and the Indonesian group won for the second year, but it is lovely just to see all the different costumes and the different styles of dance.

One of the dancers from Kazakistan

Some of the groups stay in hotels and some stay with families; we have a 10-year old Lithuanian boy who endured a 3-day coach journey to get here and has the same to face going home this week.  He is quiet and polite but speaks good English for a 10 year old and after the first night, when he spoke with his mum and was a bit teary, he has been fine!

Kaan and his friend

In addition to all this, we had a big wedding to go to on Saturday.  Some of you might have seen the Cem’s pictures of the bridal car which he organized and drove – nothing sleek and elegant of course but a huge, mean Dodge Ram pick up!  The groom was delighted but I think the bride must have struggled to climb into it in her gown.
Then, of course, it was Easter weekend, which doesn't get a lot of attention here except among the ex-pats but we did celebrate with a few (specially brought over) chocolate eggs.

And finally, though it didn’t focus in our activities, 23 April is also St George’s Day and here are a couple of facts that amazed me when I discovered them.  Firstly, St George is in no way exclusively English and is actually the patron saint of quite a list lot of countries – including Lithuania; and secondly, though there are various accounts of his life, he appears to have come from Cappadocia in Turkey!

2011 season has opened at Poppy

2011 season’s first guests arrived yesterday and it has been a bit of a rush to get things ready. We still have the painters in and a lot of cleaning up to do but the front of the hotel looks great now the scaffold has come down and the pool is full.

Poppy Apartments 2011 new look

Actually it always seems to turn into a race to get ready in time. The year we built the hotel our very first guests were arriving in the middle of May and with just a few days to go, there was no paving round the pool and no steps up to the bar. Last year, we were still in the midst of stripping all the furniture and repainting it when we got a last minute reservation for a group of four rooms. Not wanting to turn it down, we ran around sorting out rooms and tidying up the common areas, only to have the dust cloud prevent them from coming.

In Turkey it is quite normal to leave things until the last minute. There is a Turkish proverb which says ‘don’t roll your trouser leg up until you see the stream’! I have tried really hard to think of an English equivalent but can’t come up with one; ours tend to lean more towards the ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ and ‘don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today’ philosophy!

I have to say it is one of the things that I have struggled to adjust too. I don’t get as stressed as I used to but I am still the sort of girl who would rather roll my trouser leg up if I know the stream is up ahead – even if it is still a way away!

I got excited this week when I got a letter from the accountants dealing with the demise of Goldtrail. I thought that there might actually be a pay out coming as I recently received £88 from the travel trust to cover the few nights for guests who were in at the time they went into administration. No such luck, though. Nine months after I put my claim in they have sent a letter acknowledging our claim of £2330 but saying they could not yet give any information about how much of that we are likely to receive – or when.

It would have come in very handy at the moment with the cost of the work on the hotel. As with most jobs, once you start it tends to grow so that you are doing – and spending – more than you anticipated. And we are still chasing money from the agency for last year’s guests. Since the bottle of Jack Daniels and promise to pay all in February they have been very hard to pin down….

….patience is a virtue, particularly in Turkey!

wedding anniversary last week spent waiting for electric board!

Fethiye Museum and the British Museum

Work on the hotel is progressing – slowly. The outside has been painted – in parts; other bits are still the old yellowish colour. I was so impressed when the painters arrived and the first thing they did was to put up a professional-looking scaffold. However I haven’t seen them use it since; it seems they prefer to hang off balconies or the roof reaching as far as they can – and then a bit more. I wonder if our insurance covers industrial accidents!


Kaan and I finally went to check out the refurbished Fethiye Museum last week. It’s not very big and doesn’t take long to look around but the pieces are quite well displayed now. There are a few statues and carved panels; one of the most significant pieces is a mosaic floor from the Temple of Apollo at Letoon which shows the symbols of Apollo – a bow and arrow and a lyre. The rest is mostly small pots, coins and jewellery.

The most amazing thing, for me, is the age of the things there; it starts with a cabinet of late Bronze Age items some of which date from 3000 BC! Most of the things belonged to the Lycian people who lived in this area from that time until about the sixth century AD. Letoon, where the mosaic was found, was the spiritual centre of Lycia but other important settlements include Tlos, Xanthos (jeep safaris usually visit these), Cadianda and Telmessos, which was located where Fethiye is today and is still visible in the form of the amphitheatre and rock tombs.

One of the interesting things about Lycia and its people is that it represents the first example of a democratic federation. Each settlement was a self-governing city-state but joined together in the Lycian League to organize trade between cities and defence of the area. Free male citizens of each city elected their representatives on the League’s Assembly whose number depended on the size of the city. Another interesting fact is the number of important leaders who came to Lycia, including Alexander the Great and the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who built huge grain stores at Patara during his stay there.

You can see the remains of these and many other features of Lycia during a visit to Fethiye. Actually, you can visit some of it without even coming to Fethiye as there are some large pieces in the British Museum. Years ago, after Cem had spent the summer showing jeep safari customers the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos, we visited the British Museum. When we got to the Xanthian room and he saw the real tomb (the one on site is a copy) he got – understandably – a little worked up and we left the museum shortly afterwards! During a visit to the area in 1838, Charles Fellows sent 70 crates of artefacts back to the British Museum and while I don’t dispute his work in uncovering some of these things and making sure they were preserved, I think it is time most of them were returned here, to be displayed in the Fethiye museum!

Blackpool and Fethiye are shaking!

How weird is this?  I was hiding in reception because tiles were being lowered from the roof and rather a lot seemed to be falling out of the bucket, threatening to cause serious damage to anyone who happened to be walking underneath.  I was checking the newspapers and had just read that Blackpool experienced an earthquake at 3.30 this morning.  Now some of you will know that Blackpool is the home of some dear friends of ours – so I was just trying to open MSN to ask Grant if he had been jumping around at that time, when I felt the table shake and realised we were having an earthquake!

It’s not so unusual here, but it has been several months since I felt the last one.  We checked on the Government site where the details are published almost immediately, and it registered 6.3 in strength but the centre was 12km deep under the sea off Rhodes.

Living here, you get quite used to feeling quakes, and quite good at judging how big they are.  Sometimes it seems as though your chair or bed has suddenly become wobbly, sometimes it feels as if you’ve had one too many drinks and your head is spinning.  But the thing to remember is that these relatively small and frequent tremors are good; they show that the plates are moving and not building up pressure for a big quake.

Since the big earthquake near İstanbul in 1999, some Turks have shown a tendency to panic at the slightest hint of an earthquake.  I don’t imagine it was reported in the UK, but over here the newspapers were full of how the only person to jump out of a window during the terrible earthquake in Japan was a Turkish guy living near Tokyo; he jumped out once, went back inside, felt the second quake and jumped out AGAIN!   The newspapers explained it with this phrase:  ‘Even in Japan, a Turk is still a Turk’!

However, at Poppy I am pleased to report that nobody jumped out of any windows and even the guy who was sitting on the roof at the time (of course with no safety line – this it Turkey!) looked very puzzled when we told him to take care.  I have also been up on the roof in the last couple of days – not exactly sitting on it, as the workers do, but poking my head through it to get an idea of the view from the soon-to-be-there balcony of the brand new roof apartment.  It is going to be great up there; you can even get a glimpse of the sea in a couple of places!

Other work is progressing, never quite as quickly as I hope but perhaps that is because I’m too impatient.  And that just goes to show that even in Turkey, a Brit is still a Brit!!

(By the way I am having some trouble posting blogs since blogspot has been banned in Turkey; please bear with me!)