Roadtrip; Kütahya and Ankara

We are currently on a road trip. Our final stop will be Tiblisi, Georgia, it is a 2000km drive but we are making lots of stops.

 

Our first stop was in Kütahya, a place where we have at one point lived. In central Turkey, it is known for its beautiful handmade pottery and we bought some beautiful pieces. We stayed there for 1 night and then went to Ankara, the capital.

While mostly a modern city it has some beautiful old gems too.

As a Le Petit Prince fan, I had to take a photo of this building!

My favorite part was the cute little streets around the castle. It was quite hot so we didn't visit the castle itself.

We stayed for 2 nights and bought some beautiful vintage pieces for our home decor shop.

We have now reached the Black Sea, our first stop is Sinop, which will be my next blog post. I've never been to the Black Sea, so I am very excited to discover and share it!

Wanderlust and Terrible Dust

Wednesday morning I headed to Kütahya, if you have been following our blog for 10 years and have an excellent memory, you might remember that we have an old house there.

It is about 500km from our home, normally I take the longer route as it is a highway but I took by accident the shorter one and I ended up in some cute villages which were also fun.

Traffic was mostly a bunch of geese :)

I was in Kütahy till Saturday evening. The house was in a much worse state, we never went there in the past 10 years. I didn't take any photos, everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, windows were broken and thieves even stole the doors and metal work of the windows. Time was not so kind to the building but it was the people who ruined it.

As it is a historic building I went to several governmental offices that might buy it. I also spoke to the new Mayor of Kütahya which is luckily not part of AKparty which is a big improvement and a lucky break. Hopefully, soon they'll buy it and renovate it, I'm not holding my breath but at least I did something about it. I stayed with friend's who are some of the sweetest people we know which was a ray of sunshine in the otherwise somber visit.

This and that

Summer is still going hot and strong over here, and it will take atleast a month to cool down a bit. Doggies are happy and a bit overheated as you can see :)

At the previous blogpost I mentioned that I went to Kütahya but not the reason. The reason was that we have a very old house there (built in 1902). The house needs a renovation and we don't have the money for it so it is just standing there. No one wants to buy such a burden, except the goverment. The reason that the goverment wants it is beside to renovate it and give the city a fresh look is that the first president of Turkey, Atatürk has visited and maybe even stayed in our house. In almost every city of Turkey is an Atatürk museum, they now want to make a museum of our house. Of course the goverment wants to pay such a small amount of money that we needed to go there to talk with the mayor of Kütahya. I went there with our lawyer, the road is not a problem if you go on your own or with a friend. But this time it was HELL, the lawyer did not stop talking....*sigh* so two days long I had a terrible headache during the journey.


The blue one is ours, it is huge! About 650 square meter of living space, but now impossible to use. Of course the mayor preposed a joke of a price and we went back empty handed. We will see if we will ever hear from them again, we will keep you posted :)

On the way back, we went on sunday and returned on monday, I was so tired of listening to the verbal tornado of our lawyer that I took some fun pictures of the night with lights :)

A little peek in our home

We wanted to show you today a special piece of our kitchen, other ways a standard Ikea kitchen, but to camouflage the aspirator, we used an antique mantel piece.


This wooden mantel is much older than the house, at least fifty years, but it blends wonderfully in the local architecture of the house with all the blond pine wood.




It is scroll saw, with the Islamic five point star in the center and vines and leaves at the sides.

The ceramics on top are mostly from Kütahya (the florals) and Cappadocia (the small tan bowls).

It is a lovely piece of folks art, all done with hand tools.

These type of mantel pieces are meant to be placed lower on the wall, above the hearth. We couldn't find decent pictures on the net, only two quite blurred ones, included to give you an idea.

The traditional Turkish living room includes a hearth, where the woman cooks, sitting on her heels. Usually, in that kind of houses, that still can be found in many rural places, there is no kitchen or indoor pluming.

The room is multi functional, being sitting and dinner room during the day. Meals are eaten sitting cross legged on the floor, around a very large round tray. At night, bedding is pulled from under the settees and beds are made on the floor for the family.

Abundance

A few weeks ago we where invited to the wedding of a very good friend. Mum couldn’t come because of the surgery she recently had (if you are curious look a few posts back). But I was really happy to hit the roads for new adventures!
Kütahya is a very strange city, full with beautiful historical buildings but also full of strange people. We bought a very old house there years ago with the dream to renovate it but never had the chance to realize it (financially). We still own that house and it was full of dust and other unpleasant things. I had to clean it for two days but it was good to check things out.
The road was good and the journey great, I arrived very fast (within 5 hours) without any problems.


I was staying at some friends whom I hadn’t seen for 6, 7 years and it was very nice to see them again. I went Wednesday the 13th and Thursday morning it started to snow a little, quite normal for middle Turkey. The plan was to have fun and go to the wedding at Saturday and then drive back on Sunday. But the snow… well it suddenly wasn’t slow anymore…


With all the snow excitement I mostly forgot to take pictures because it was windy and wet and freezing cold. The snow kept on falling and when it was finally the wedding day it was impossible to go by car…Luckily the wedding was close by and it was great. I really enjoyed it although I am usually not really a fan of weddings.


A friend would come, who has a big car to put some stuff in that stayed in the house. Thanks Heaven he was there other wise I still would be there. When he came Sunday morning he said there was only a little snow, so we packed our stuff quickly and started our journey at 1 p.m.
We thought that after Afyon it would be okay. Usually it takes less then an hour to arrive there but it took 2.5 hours. We ate a little and went on. But the snow just would not stop. Snow and more snow. Just when we thought it would end it even got worse… the wind blew up the snow and everything was white, snow white…



I took some pictures at the beginning where I still could drive with 1 hand, but afterwards I could hardly see anything and a lot of cars where smashed or hidden under a thick blanket of snow. So the pictures are only the beginning… the journey took 14 hours (instead of 5) and we where like zombies when we arrived.


The snow never ended until Muğla which is only 1 hour away from home. It hasn’t snowed all winter and everyone thought I brought abundance to Kütahya because snow means water. But I have to say abundance can be pretty dangerous :D