Day 19 - Bursa to Anakara

Another wet and cold morning as we set off to visit the Tomb of Sultan and the Green Mosque. The Green Mosque is very beautiful and the caretaker into one of the side rooms which even our guide hadn't been in before and read the scriptures that are written in religious Arabic. Interestingly again even though 99% of the population are Muslim they do not teach Arabic in the schools and only a very few can read the religious Arabic. The scriptures talk about love you should love others, not harm others, not lying to the others and if you do you do it to the world etc. The words were very beautiful shame that some choose not to follow them.

After our visit we headed to a Cumalikizik Village but as it was raining the locals had not come out with their wears so we didn't stay long. It was a very quaint village with wooden homes and cobble stone streets.

We stopped for lunch on our long drive to Anakara stopping at the burial mound of the Phrygian King Midas with the original 'golden touch'. The tomb is amazing, the wooden structure they built to make the tomb is still in very good condition and his skeleton was apparently also complete even though it is around 700BC. They used to build a wooden tomb and cover it with dirt creating a huge mound, around the area you can see many of these mounds creating an odd man made landscape of small hills. We visited the small museum which contained the finds from the excavations from the Gordion Village near by.

The drive into Anakara is fascinating. They build these huge condos in the middle of nowhere and there is hundreds of them. They have a co-op system here as it is the only way they can afford their own homes. The condo buildings are usually all exactly the same and there could be ten in a group and then several groups together. It is there location that is confusing, they seem to be just condos on top of a hill, no infrastructure around them, just condos and lots of them. As you drive into Anakara which is the capital of Turkey it is just mind blowing the amount of huge high rise condos, businesses and shopping centres. Four million people live here and the size of the place is astonishing.

The weather is better in Anakara thank goodness as at one stage it was 6 degrees when we were in the mountains. At least here it is 18 and not raining. Nearly time for dinner so until tomorrow J&N.