Finding Heaven and Hell in Turkey
I came close to death and a truck filled with chocolate returned me to life
Hi all,
I always like to leave a note at the top of my stories. It’s my brief interlude before the music begins. The music of the words. It may sound silly, but when I write words, they feel like I’m composing a song.
In this series of words, I write about nearly dying. I guess I’ve nearly died a lot because I’ve written about coming close to death numerous times. But I’m still delightedly living.
There was a time when I thought my death was near as I lay in a room in Turkey on the Syrian border. During that time, I made an enemy out of a rooster, and after I survived, there was chocolate, a family of Turks, and the Mediterranean Sea.
Read on…
I was lying on my back, staring straight up at a bare light bulb hanging from a long, naked wire. The light was off and the pension room was dark, but I could see the headlights of cars trail across the ceiling and walls around me. I wanted to close my eyes, but every time I did, my stomach churned and my head pounded, so I followed the headlights to distract from my agony.
The sheets under me were soaked, and I was covered in sweat. One minute, I was shivering and cold; the next, waves of heat seared under my skin and made me feel I was on fire.
My second-story window was open, and outside, I heard the blare of horns and distorted music. Turkish pop star Tarkan was blasting from blown-out speakers, and in between songs, I heard the constant crow of a rooster. The bird bellowed out a wickedly high-pitched song. A piercing death knell. It had been incessantly crowing on a loop every one of the three long days I lay poisoned at the Star Pansiyon in Kızkalesi.
As I lay there in anguish, I spoke through dry, chaffed lips. I said to no one but the room, “Let me die. It’s okay to die here.”
I had been traveling in Turkey for two months during the summer of 1995. Falling in love with the country and its people had been easy. I’d had adventures down the Aegean coast from Istanbul and back, and then all along the Black Sea to Trabzon.
I slept on a rooftop in Istanbul facing the Blue Mosque, and was nearly swindled by a coin dealer in the early morning at Ephesus. An Aussie rambler and I looked for mermaids for two weeks while sleeping on a seaside cliff outside Fethiye. A family took me in near Samsun for a week, and one night at a full moon party of belly dancers, a drunken uncle grabbed me by the shoulders and called me Indiana Jones.
After spending my 23rd birthday at the 1,600-year-old Sumela Monastery built on the steep cliffside of a mountain 4,000 feet up, I made my way south. First to Ankara, then Cappadocia, and down to Adana. I was running out of Turkish lira and needed to return to Prague soon for DJ gigs, so I decided to spend my last days by the sea.
Kızkalesi used to be the ancient city of Korykos. It was 200 miles from the Syrian border on the Mediterranean coast, and I’d heard there was an island castle there, so I took a bus to the tiny seaside town.
When I arrived, the dirt roads were filled with Turks and soldiers from Adana in the desert heat. Cars, buses, and taxis sped by, stirring up dirt, and merchants called out from a market near the main street. I bought several large bottles of water from one of the merchants in a small bazaar and tied them to my backpack. Then, I found the Star Pansiyon.
There was a young, clean-shaven man at a decaying front desk. He greeted me with a smile and said, “Merhaba! Hello. Welcome! I am Akif. How many nights you stay?”
“I’m not sure yet. Maybe one or two,” I said.
“You have passport?”
I handed it to him.
“Aah, American. Business, travel, or maybe soldier?”
“I’m traveling.”
“Yes, yes. You like my country?”
“Yes, Akif. Türkiye çok güzel.”
I’d said those words many times. It meant ‘Turkey is very beautiful’ and it was the truth.
“Thank you! And here you see heaven and hell,” he said with foreboding darkness.
“I’m sorry. What?” I asked.
“Here in Kızkalesi, we have Cennet ve Cehennem. The caves of Heaven and Hell. Very beautiful.”
“Oh. Well, maybe I’ll see those. Thank you. Teşekkür ederim.”
With those final words hanging in the air, I put my backpack in my room and went to the seaside to find the castle.
I could smell how close the sea was, and the sea breeze led me to the beach. The castle sat on an island far from the shore. Floating ghostly on the horizon.
The beach was nearly empty and I decided to have a swim. When I was in the water, the ocean surged, and my head started to spin. I immediately began to feel dizzy and nauseous, and I got out of the water quickly.
When I got onshore, I could barely use my legs. I was weak and wobbly, and my head seemed to fill with helium and pollution. I thought I have to get back to my room now, and I stumbled back to the pension. After getting up the stairs and through the door, I collapsed into bed and started sweating profusely.
It felt as though poison entered every part of me.
The next hours were a blur as my thoughts jumbled more and more. I fell into a dark oblivion, and when I had moments of lucidity, I tried to figure out what was happening.
I’d eaten some goat cheese, pilav, and lentil soup at the bus station in Adana. None of that seemed bad or rancid. No one I’d met in the last few days had given me anything, and I’d taken no drugs or drank any booze. I’d been living clean and sober since I left Prague and my life as a DJ many weeks before.
I had been on a spiritual quest in Turkey. One where I meditated daily, visiting mosques and many ancient holy places. Muslim, Christian, and Greek gods all accompanied me where I went. I was purifying myself of all those late nights spinning Trip Hop and Acid Jazz in dance clubs.
But now, my journey of purification had led me to a nightmare.
The hours grew into two days of agony. I spent half of it in bed and the other half hovering over the toilet. Constantly getting rid of every single thing in my body.
Outside, I continued to hear the ear-piercing cockle-doo-doo of the rooster. Crowing its mad song nonstop. Taunting me.
“Shut up, bird,” I breathed out through parched lips while lying in bed paralyzed by pain. “Shuuut uuup.”
Then, I would pass out for several hours. Day blurred with night, and my dreams blurred with my waking thoughts.
On day three, all my bottles of water were empty, and I knew how bad that was. I couldn’t drink the water from the tap in Turkey, and my body was completely dehydrated. I had to get fluids. I had to get to the bazaar.
First, I needed to stand.
It felt like years before I could process how to sit up, and more years to actually move my body. After I finally sat up, the Earth rotated. Its axis shifted, and I was a satellite without an orbit, spinning outward to infinity. I found the gravitational pull again, and in my delirium, I convinced myself to fly down the stairs and into the market outside.
I may not be able to walk, but I can float, I thought. In my mind, it was better to be a ghost than it was to die.
I rose and stood, the room teetering, and I began my hallucinogenic quest for water. I ventured out of the room and down the hall. Everything was diagonal when I reached the stairs, so I used the white walls to propel myself to enter the blisteringly bright and busy world.
Cars were speeding, and people were everywhere. Men sat smoking and playing backgammon and drinking tea. It was chaos, but I was in slow motion. I moved down a passageway and got to the first shop with a few tables under a tent.
Standing beautifully in a row inside a refrigerator, like green magic potions, were bottles of Sprite. My mouth would have drooled if I had any saliva. Next to the soda were plastic bottles of water on a table, and in my haze, near the water, there was a dark mustache, and it was moving. I heard Turkish words come from under it.
Connected to the mustache was a worried merchant. He looked at me with great concern, put a bottle of Sprite and two large bottles of water into a bag, and charged me nothing. He just motioned gently with his hand that it was okay.
Floating back to my room was no longer an option because gravity had suddenly increased, so trudging foot by foot, I made it. When I got inside, I sat down on the bed and opened the Sprite, slowly sipping the sweet bubbles and letting them pop on my tongue. Then, I passed out.
I slept for a thousand hours and during that time, my fever broke. I became conscious a few times, drank water, and it stayed in my body. The sweating stopped and after fighting with my sheet for hours — once discovering it wrapped around my neck like a noose — it now rested over me like the wings of an angel.
On morning four, I woke up and was very weak, but I no longer wanted to die. The noise of the street was still relatively quiet. There were cars and buses, but no music. And then, I realized, there was no sound of the rooster either.
I stood up and went to the open window. I put my head out and looked down. The rooster was there on the ground, lying with its wings sprawled. A scrawny bird with dirty black feathers. It was being eaten by a calico cat. The cat looked up at me, we acknowledged each other, and it went back to eating the rooster.
I went out and visited the merchant who gave me Sprite and water the previous day. He seemed very happy to see me alive.
I bought some freshly baked bread, yogurt, and honey from him and gave him extra for his life-saving gifts the day before. In my room, I ate five or six shaky spoonfuls of yogurt with honey, and I saved the bread for later. Then, I packed my things and went to the front desk to pay for my stay.
“Did you visit Heaven and Hell?” Akif asked.
“One of them,” I said.
He looked bewildered but said nothing more. I paid and left.
I’d spent nearly all my money staying extra days and knew I’d need to find a rooftop or some other cheap place to stay in Istanbul before I flew back to Prague, so I decided to try and hitch a ride. Hitchhiking had worked for me many times in many places before and I had nothing to lose now.
I walked wearily but optimistically out to the edge of Kızkalesi, turned around, and swung my right thumb out.
As the mid-morning sun rose, the heat rose with it and my backpack felt very heavy on my weak body. Thirty minutes went by with many cars and buses passing, but no takers. I ate a little bread and then kept thumbing for another half hour. Still, no one stopped.
Then, a small truck with an Ülker chocolate logo on the side drove past me, slowed down, and pulled over.
As I walked up to the side, the passenger door swung open. A young, smiling boy peered out. Then, a second boy tumbled over the top of him, laughing. With both boys hanging out of the truck, I heard a man’s voice. When I reached the door and could see inside, I saw three Turks beaming at me with smiles made out of magic.
The younger-looking of the two boys asked, “English?”
“American,” I said.
The two boys giggled, and the man’s eyebrows raised.
“I am Turgay,” the man said, and pointed to the boys. “My sons. Ali and Eren. Where you go?”
“Istanbul,” I replied.
“We go beach! Then, Istanbul!” he said with excitement.
I climbed into the truck with Turgay, Ali, and Eren, and we went to a nearby stretch of beach with turquoise water.
I swam with the boys and played tag with them in the shallows. When I grew tired, I sat down on the beach next to Turgay. He was a quiet, handsome man who smoked Samsun cigarettes and let the sun play on his face. Turgay offered me a cigarette and we smoked together in the calm, listening to the waves, and watching Ali and Eren make sand castles.
Few words were said because they spoke very little English and I spoke very little Turkish, but we were a family of happy vagabonds that day.
When the sun dropped toward the horizon, we started toward Ankara. It was an eleven-hour drive to Istanbul. We drove until it was dark and the boys were asleep, then Turgay pulled off into a parking lot where buses and a few other trucks were parked.
Without saying anything, he got out, opened the back of the truck, and gestured me inside. I was his guest, and my bed was among the many cardboard boxes filled with chocolate stacked to the ceiling.
I wasn’t completely well yet, but when I lay among the boxes and boxes of chocolate, everything felt blissful. Then I drifted off and was awakened by the sound of the truck door rolling open hours later.
The early morning light streamed across our faces on the road to Istanbul. Ali and Eren sitting on either side of me and Turgay humming along to Turkish music on the radio.
When we arrived, they dropped me on the Asian side of the city. Turgay shook my hand, placed a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Goodbye, American friend. Mashallah.”
“Mashallah, Turgay,” I said, returning his blessing of good fortune.
He got in his truck with Eren and Ali waving through the window as the boys tumbled over each other, and they drove away.
I never ate any of Turgay’s chocolate or learned how I was poisoned. I also never saw the caves in Kızkalesi, but I did experience heaven and hell during my last days in Turkey. It was possible to do that in a place where ancient met modern, East met West, and many beliefs were born, blended, and thrived.
In that mystical country, heaven and hell existed, castles floated on the sea, roosters sang sinister songs, being a ghost was better than death, and a family driving a chocolate truck took a young hitchhiker all the way to Istanbul.
Thank you to marvelous editor and writer , who expertly helped polish my story and published it originally on Travel Memoirs in August 2024.
There’s more to learn about my writing, my music, and my work with clients at GentryBronson.com.
Damn Gentry, that’s quite a story!
Wonderful storytelling Gentry. I felt your pain - and I could relate, such is the life of the traveler.