Friday morning dawned bright and warm again. Pat and I decided we would try to get a boat to Donkey Island - not having done any of the side trips at all so far. We called in for a moment to see Niyazi to say we were in a hurry because we were chasing the boat but that we would call in on the way back. When we got to the quay there were no boats except one private one that had just landed. Pat asked the police, who weren't much help. She then asked the army who had headquarters along the beach front. They didn’t have any ideas either. Then we found a boat that was labelled right but it was empty. It turned out we had missed the big boat which must have left early - perhaps being chartered by a group and therefore filled. So we were foiled again.

Pat still hadn't spent her money on this leather jacket she so much wanted. We had had quite a long discussion with Niyazi earlier about leather jackets. After he had retired from the Turkish air force, he had started out with a carpet shop, then he had sold copper, and then leather goods, so he knew what he was talking about. He showed Pat how to test the leather to see if it was good quality. We didn't understand just what it was we were checking, but later, when she starting pulling and feeling the leather, the shopkeepers obviously thought she was knowledgeable and treated her with new respect. She had nearly decided on the coat she wanted - from our friend the Irishman's shop. He wasn't really Irish but he had been to Ireland. It turns out that it is very difficult for a Turk to travel to Britain - the visas that they are required to get make them prove how much money they have at home - as a sort of inducement for them to go back, fearing that they are using trips to England as a way of illegally emigrating. But our friend in the coat shop said he got around this by going to Ireland, and then he traveled freely from Ireland to England - no questions asked.

So we suggested this method to Niyazi for his son who so much wanted a foreign wife. I had thought long and hard about Niyazi's son and his wishes. I didn't for a moment think it was a good idea for him to marry in order to emigrate. But if he managed to find a girl who met his criterion and he loved her too, fine and good. So I suggested to Niyazi that maybe his son could have pen pals in England. I even said I might be able to find some girls who would write to him. I asked Niyazi if his son could write in English. He admitted no, but said he could help him with the letters. I said my daughter might know some people who might write to him and she might write to him too. I think he got the wrong end of the stick, and thought that I was offering my daughter as a potential wife for his son. He started going on and on about the good qualities of his son - how honest and kind and sensitive and good he was. He said “Your daughter must write to him and send him her picture, and then she can come on holiday and they can meet and if they like each other than things can go on from there.”

It was so awkward. I backtracked without wanting to say, my daughter would not want to marry your son. She has big plans and ambitions and certainly wouldn't want to be married to a faithful Moslem. But I was afraid of hurting his feelings. He was so kind and good and sensitive. I just said I would talk to my daughter but couldn't promise that she would write. He said, of course that is the way it must be.
 

Niyazi said that the fast ended that evening at eight, and he would very much like to take us out for a walk in the town with him after that. Pat and I agreed, and I said I would ask Migraine Pat if she would like to come too. He offered to come to the hotel to pick us up, but I was a bit embarrassed by this idea and said it would be better for us to meet him by his shop at nine.

We skipped bridge that night because of our date. But our meal that night was very nice- grilled steaks. I felt the cook had made up entirely for the cold chips of the night before.

Just before nine, the two Pats and I wandered down the paths in the dark and got to the shop. Niyazi was waiting for us outside. He had put on his suit, white shirt and tie, and had leather sandals on instead of his trainers. We walked along the street and it turned out that this was the first time he had actually seen this street. He had only been in the town only for a week and each day from 8 til 8 he had spent in his own shop. He had no idea of the numbers of carpet shops in the town who were his competition. He explained that he was in partnership with his friend who called him brother. I think up until the last year or so, Niyazi had owned a shop himself, but it wasn't making enough money so he sold it and went into partnership with this other man. 

As we walked down the street various people who recognized us as English from the hotel, because we had been in their shops or talked to them earlier made some sort of joking reference to Niyazi about us being out together. He didn't seem embarrassed but rather pleased that he had made us his friends and was sort of showing us off. We came to a rather expensive pastry shop. We went in and he offered us this special holiday treat called Baklava. This holiday was called the Festival of Sweets and on Saturday, families would give their children sweets, and they would be given to friends, etc.

“The other big festival we will have in about a month's time, and this time each family who can afford it must kill a sheep, and give half of the meat to the poor,” he said. "This is to insure that at least once a year all the poor people have some meat to eat. That celebration was called the Festival of Sacrifice."

The Baklava was very sweet- a sort of flakey pastry with pistachio nuts on top and a honey syrup throughout and under it. We each had three squares. It made my teeth hurt it was so sweet but Niyzai felt he was doing us a tremendous honour by giving us this, and sharing his holiday with us.

Niyazi's friend also owned a Motel or Pension in Cesme, which was where Niyazi lived for the season. The previous year he had spent a few weeks working at a carpet place in Kusadasi but had felt the cheating and excessive rip-offs by the agents were not to his liking.

He said the carpets in his shop had been bought by his partner, (no wonder the partner was upset by the bargain I was given for my carpet) but the partner now said that if Niyazi wanted to bring in other items to sell in the shop as well, he could do so. We said we thought this was a good idea.

It was rather an unattractive, uninviting shop and fussy rich foreigners like us liked to have a wide range of choice in both types of gifts and prices. He said that in a week, he and his son would go by bus to Istanbul and buy some shawls and some kilim bags. Did we think those would be an asset to his shop? We said yes, but we offered to think of the sorts of things he could sell that we had been looking for or would have bought but they weren't available. We thought of a few things to go on with - pictures, worry beads, cheap items with price tags on. But he felt the things had to be in keeping with a carpet shop and not get mixed up with a souvenir shop.
 

When we got to the sea area, we turned to the left and walked towards the mosque. We asked Niyazi about the church related activities for the holiday. He said that tomorrow was the big celebration. The service would be at eight in the morning and that most men would go to it. It would involve certain prayers and also a sermon by the muezzin. Just as we stood outside the mosque, the muezzin starting calling the faithful to prayers.

We asked Niyazi about this need of praying at various times. He said,  “Five times a day,   Moslems are expected to pray: morning, lunchtime, early afternoon, late afternoon and in the evening.” This one, about 9 o'clock was the last call or prayer. We asked him if he wanted to go into the mosque and could not do so because we were with him. He said he couldn’t go in as he wasn’t prepared. Before he could go into a mosque, he needed to wash three times his hands, his mouth, nose and arms. As he hadn’t done he was not considered clean enough to go into the mosque.

We asked if he needed to pray just then, and he said he could pray in between one prayer period and the next one. He would pray when he got home that evening. And then he would get up at five on Saturday morning and pray until 7.45 when he and his partner would go to the mosque for the service. This would last until nearly nine when they needed to go to open their shop. We asked about women going to the mosque. He said a few times a year there would be a service that women could go to, but mostly they were expected to pray at home. And when they were in the mosque, they were not allowed in the same part as the men. They had to be behind a curtain.

We asked if we could visit a mosque. He said, yes, as long as it wasn't when a prayer service was going on, and as long as we took off our shoes and covered our heads with scarves. We actually had come prepared that evening hoping he would take us inside the mosque and tell us about it, but obviously it wasn't the right time. I asked about what the inside looked like. He said it was all empty - no furniture of any kind and rows of prayer mats on the floor spaced so that they could bend down to pray and also could sit back for other prayers.

We talked a long time about religion. We wanted to know what the Moslems thought about life after death. Niyazi assured us that they believed in God, the one true God and that in the end everyone would go to God. He said the maxim of his religion was that everyone should treat everyone else as they would like to be treated, a concept we recognized from Christianity, the only difference was that the Moslems actually seemed to do it as a matter of course. (Perhaps a bit naive now considering how things have gone over the past few years.)

Hospitality and friendship was a way of life for them. He said, if he had done wrong, he didn't go to a priest for forgiveness - he talked to his God about it. He would talk to God before he went to bed at night. He would put his actions into those which were positive and did good, and those which were negative and bad. If the bad outweighed the good, he couldn't go to sleep. If the good outweighed the bad, he went right to sleep and had a good night.

Pat confided in him that she felt that her husband who died about four years before, seemed to be near her always. He said, “Yes this is so.” He then said, “I am going to tell you something and you will not believe me.”

I stupidly said, "I think I know what you are going to say.” I had the sort of impression that he had psychic powers and was going to say that he could see that Pat's husband's spirit was there with her. But that wasn't it.

He said that he had been out of his body. He said that his spirit sometimes came out of his body and did what I'm not sure. Both of the Pats immediately said they did believe him because they had had similar experiences and had heard of others who had had them too.

I wanted to know if he had been ill when this happened, but he said no. I think it happened as a result of deep meditation when he was praying. I think he was surprised that we accepted this statement so matter-of-factly. We told him that we felt he was a very good and holy man.

I expected him to do the English thing and say, "Oh I am not all that good and holy” but what he did say was this, “You also must be good to recognise the goodness in me.” He said, "You are not on the first level." I remembered vaguely having read about how some religions had people progressing through numbers of reincarnations up by levels until they reached perfection and heaven. I wondered if he was implying that we had existed before. Anyway there was so much to say, and so little time. However, I didn't feel I could let this conversation end, knowing about the lowly place of women in Turksh life, without me making a stand for women’s rights.

“In our country,” I said, “women would be very upset to be forbidden to go to church or to be kept in a separate area from the men. If your son wishes to marry an English girl, he would need to get used to the idea that modern European and English women expect and demand to be treated as equals.”

I climbed off my soap box but I think I shook him up a bit. We started back up towards the hotel shortly after 10.30. He wanted to walk us home but we said it wasn’t necessary. He showed us where he lived, the pension of his friend, the Pamukkele Motel, where he told us they had lots of hot water.

But when he saw we intended to walk across the dark pasture area he was worried we wouldn’t get home safely and insisted on going with us. At the place we usually went up, we obviously woke up and startled the donkey who began to bray, and startled us. We found another rather more convoluted path and eventually get to the main road.

We invited Niyazi in to see our hotel. I thought he would refuse, but he was pleased to accept our hospitality, thinking to offend us if he refused I suppose. We got orange drinks and a coke for him and sat around talking with some of the other ladies. The bridge was still in progress. He was very impressed with the excellent view we got from our hotel.

The building itself gives an impression of wealth. The patio outside, the floor and the steps up to the bedrooms were all marble and highly polished. The furniture was very plain - grey couches and chairs. There were no pictures except for a very badly done oil painting of a seascape on the landing, which was meant to complement the collection of stones and pebbles from the beach that were in a glass case the length of the wall. The outside walls were all sliding glass doors covered with net curtains, but the quality of the doors was poor, and they creaked and were hard to open.

Behind the hotel and up some more stairs - although rough concrete ones this time - was the pool area. The pool was brilliant blue, about 20 yards long and 10 yards wide, deep for 3/4 of the length. There was adequate space all around the pool for all the guests to be out sunning themselves.

Then in yet a higher area there were more tables and chairs and that was where we ate when we had meals outside. In fact the idea was that in the summer, all the evening meals would be served outside and the kitchen was actually located out there too. So that was why our food was so often cold. They cooked it outside and then had to carry it down all the steps and into the hotel dining room. But even when the days we ate outside the food was not warm because the outside air on those days was pretty cold too.

But the view from the hotel was magnificent. You could see the town below with the minarets of the mosques sticking up. The Castle area was floodlit and this stood out on the skyline. Then you could see various lights on the water of boats and all the ordinary town lights. It was lovely.

About 11:15 or so Niyazi left us hoping to get a few hours sleep before his prayer time began.