Round Trip

I had the wonderful experience yesterday of walking from my town, Ibrahimpasa, to the next town, Ortahisar.  I have never had the opportunity to walk from one town to the next before and it made me really understand what Werner Herzog meant when he said (and I am paraphrasing)- "If you have to do something important, you should walk there, no matter how long the journey."  Although this statement always made sense to me hypothetically, I really came to understand just how powerful it is to undertake a long walking journey in order to reach a destination.   It is a truly powerful experience to finally descend on a new location with your body completely alive from the physical exertion and your senses stimulated from the smells, sights and temperature of your surroundings.   And Ortahisar is such a magnificent image to behold that it made sense to make this kind of a grand gesture of a journey in it's honor.

Ortahisar

The 'kale" or castle that used to house the entire village

But the pilgrimage wasn't over there.  After arriving in Ortahisar, we continued our journey through the village in search of a rock-cut complex called the Hallaç Hospital Monastery, which was once thought to be an infirmary. This isn't a widely visited site, so it was a bit of a journey in itself to find and involved walking through valleys and fields and some areas littered with garbage, but finally we arrived at this stunning site, that had no other visitors except for us.  

The complex is made up of a series of rooms with some very beautiful and simple painted designs both outside

and inside

 and in the last room, I discovered a very strange figure on the wall.  Since the figure is made out of the same material as the wall, I didn't see it at first, but then the image suddenly popped out of the stone like a ghost or spirit. It was actually a little scary- kind of like being watched without knowing it.  From what I have read, nobody seems to know the significance of this figure nor seen it anyplace else in Turkey.  

I was pretty exhausted after the very long walk to get to the Monastery and my friend, Viivi, offered to take the bus back home with me, which seemed like the reasonable thing to do, but it just didn't feel right to get on a bus at this point. After such a magical  day, it felt more appropriate to complete the circle, so we turned around and walked back home.