Magic Bus Read Free Page A

experiences established the concept of travel as an adventure of the self as well as a means of gathering knowledge. Like the hippies who followed them a century and a half later, the Grand Tourists looked abroad for models for political reform and a free-love alternative to Christianity. Both groupsaimed to learn and extract pleasure from ‘the foreign’. Most of all, they travelled to be transformed.
    â€˜The Grand Tourists changed Regency society like the sixties changed the West,’ I tell him. ‘The counterculture searched for a meaning of life outside the old institutions. Are you saying the travellers changed Turkey too?’
    This is my first chance to examine the effect of the Intrepids on the peoples along the trail.
    â€˜We saw hippies as revolutionaries,’ replies Kalkan. ‘They travelled without money, rejected materialism, cut their relationship with career and government. Their objective was to know themselves.’
    â€˜But most critics think they were naive and cultish,’ I say, at once envious and wary of their search for themselves. ‘Flower Power can be seen as sentimental Romanticism.’
    â€˜Their liberal values were innocent,’ he tells me, ‘and they spread in a soft way throughout Turkish society. Our women began to feel they had the freedom to act as they wished. Young villagers re-evaluated their culture because of hippies’ love of native clothing. They showed that there was a way of finding peaceful solutions to problems. They helped us to see that the world belongs to the people: wherever you put your feet is home.’
    â€˜Many of them were stoned out of their heads.’
    â€˜But all of them had flowers in their hair. Philosophical flowers,’ he nods, lifting his hands as he talks, as if balancing ideas. ‘And their greatest effect was
after
their journey.’
    â€˜On America and Europe?’
    â€˜Europe used to be just one colour: white. It used to have one religion: Christianity. The West believed that world history began with Greece and Rome. As you say, the hippies were curious for different cultures. From us, they learnt that Mesopotamia – here in Turkey and the Middle East – was the mother of all civilization. They carried home with them a
kilim
woven from different beliefs: threads of Islam, sky-blue of Buddhist prayer flags, silver from Hindu temple bells.’
    â€˜Like the Romantics and neo-classicism,’ I point out. ‘Thefrontier of the exotic was simply pushed further east, the imaginative potency of Italy replaced by India. Asia was the new touchstone of the ancient.’
    â€˜Their travels made Europe aware of colour, of our common heritage. In a way, humanity was reborn.’
    Kalkan laughs once more, perhaps at himself, perhaps at adolescent ideals, and runs his hands over his close-cropped, ink-black hair.
    â€˜For me, it was because of the hippies – not Silk Road traders or colonists – that most Westerners discovered the East.’
    A nightingale sings in the cedars and the evening’s mist rises from the strait. Waves of cool air flow around us heavy with the scent of honeysuckle and judas blossoms. Green leaves rustle behind a wooden railing. A sleek, stray cat slips behind the pots and across the top of a wall. In the old Greek house, Kalkan’s mother serves us yoghurt soup with mint. Afterwards, we return to the garden for tea and more conversation by the pale light of stars.
    Some time after midnight I complete my first notebook and thank Kalkan for his time. He dips his boxer’s head and thanks me for indulging his memories of flowers and fireworks. He jots down the names of friends in Ankara and Cappadocia who might be willing to help me. We shake hands at the door. I hesitate before turning away.
    â€˜How did other Turks – apart from young liberals like yourself – take to the first travellers?’ I ask him. I knew that many single