Beginning Samsun

Short History: The oldest settlements around the region go back to Paleolithic and Chalcolithic eras. Samsun (then known as Amisos) was settled between the years of 760 - 750 BC by people from Miletus who established a flourishing trade relationship with the ancient peoples of Anatolia. In the 3rd century BC, Samsun came under the expanded rule of the Pontus Kingdom.
The Romans took over in 47 BC, and were replaced by the Byzantines after the fall of Rome. The Seljuks captured Samsun in 1200, then Ottomans in the beginning of the 15th century. In the later Ottoman period the land around the town mainly produced tobacco. The town was connected to the railway system in the second half of the 19th century, and tobacco trade boomed (My father smoked the “Samsun” brand cigarettes for long years.The ferry Bandırma that took Ataturk from Istanbul to Samsun, arriving in its destination on May 19, 1919, the date that traditionally marks the beginning of the Turkish War of Independence. I actually started my travel with Samsun: it was the first city I arrived from the Western part of Turkey. I started this blog later in Sinop and decided to write about Sinop first while my impressions were fresh. I chose Samsun to be the start because I had planned to travel towards the east and thought Samsun was a good mid-point to start with. Plus it was easier to find transportation from Izmir to Samsun.
Wax sculptures showing Ataturk's arrival at Samsun to start Turkish War of Independence I was disappointed to see that it was quite a big city as my vision of the Northeastern Turkey was small little cute and green cities embracing the Black Sea. Samsun, on the other hand, promises to bury you under streets stuffed with ugly cement buildings. I immediately disliked the city and wanted to leave the next day, hopefully to a smaller town on the eastern shore. I packed my luggage next morning ready to leave.
My hotel was about 45 minutes away from the center of the city. My plan was to go see the Samsun Museum and from there not coming back to my hotel to get my luggage but directly leaving from there. I brought my luggage downstairs and told the receptionist I was leaving. He invited me for breakfast. There was another woman who seemed to be working in the “hotel” and she had made some pastries for breakfast. This was my first closer interaction with people I don’t know in this trip. They were both very nice. The man was quite handsome and he had some softness, some humility mixed with sadness, which intrigued me. Later I realized that he was disabled and used walking sticks. Turkish people’s general attitude towards the disabled is mere and severe pity and there is not much support for them. Even the sidewalks don’t have ramps for the wheelchairs and with our sidewalks and streets being so irregular, it is almost impossible for them to go out on the street without someone assisting them. The woman was in her forties and had a traditional look with her clothes and her headscarf, but she was wearing the scarf as a part of her tradition rather than a political statement (which is another huge ongoing discussion here in Turkey and one can tell from the way the scarf is worn.)
She was missing many teeth in her mouth and her remaining teeth were dark yellow. As we were chatting they were both baffled by the fact that I was traveling alone as a woman. I told them I have been living alone away from my family since the age 17. When I said that the woman looked at me in the eye and said “I wish you spent those years with them.” She was truly sad for me for being separated from my family. In Turkey people exist communally. Family ties are very strong and even after getting married the children continue their parent/child relationship in a very close manner: usually they live in the same village, town or city and quite often in the same building, if not in the same house. Decisions are made together and the “child”, whatever their age, do not easily get autonomous and are usually dependent on their parents emotionally. But it is not only dependency; it is a case of “living together” and sharing almost everything. The “privacy” concept does not exist in Turkey. Someone who doesn’t share their communal way of being is seen as cold and remote, even arrogant.  We always eat together here, we go out together and we spend time at home together.  Everyone asks about every detail of your life all the time and that is the norm. People freak out when I spend a few hours in my room alone. I have been experiencing this change from my private, autonomous and “free” self to my communal Turkish self each time I go back and forth between US and Turkey. The transition period is very uncomfortable, even painful. When I come to Turkey I have my privacy walls on around me and I get very uncomfortable with the “attacks” that challenge those walls. It takes anywhere between 2 days to 2 weeks to orient myself back to the communal life. When I go back to US, I suddenly fall into a terrible loneliness, which previously was seen as privacy. In some way that I still didn’t understand, what that woman in my Samsun hotel at breakfast stayed with me.