Tales From Turkish Caravanserai

In the days when the main means of transporting goods overland was by camel there were countless staging posts strung out along the great caravan trails of the Middle East. They were called Caravanserai and were the equivalent of the service areas on modern motorways. With changing patterns of transport and the demise of camel caravans most of these Caravanserai were abandoned.

By the late 20th Century some had been converted to hotels and were once again fulfilling the function for which they had been built. Others remain as ruins but there is one I visited that is unaltered and still used on a daily basis. The Caravanseri at Milas, a town near the Bodrum Peninsula, is in the centre of the town’s Bazaar and used by local farmers to stable their donkeys while they trade.

From the central courtyard, I took a precarious climb up crumbling foot worn stone steps to a roofed terrace to look at the tiny rooms where traders once spent the night. The floors were crumbling but the downstairs rooms are still used for storage.

An old man who was some feeding chickens beckoned me to share his own lunch. Squatting in a shady corner of this centuries old building I experienced the same hospitality that countless thousands of travellers before me had enjoyed. He grinned as the juice of the melon dribbled from my chin onto the cobbles then showed me a water tap where I could clean up before bidding him farewell.

Milas is a typical Turkish market town, unaffected by tourism. The Bazaar has no tourist trinkets just the everyday items and I had some fun trying to guess the purpose of the strange looking cooking utensils and agricultural implements.

This is where to buy the unique Milas carpets, their distinctive range of browns and yellows the result of dyes produced from local crops like tobacco.

In the narrow streets around the Bazaar, painted in an array of bright colours, many of the old Ottoman houses are still occupied while others, faded and dilapidated, gradually collapse, like the way of life they represent.

Looking further into the past the whole area is steeped in the history of ancient times. The main historic site here is the Temple of Zeus, a once formidable structure. All that remains is a single column on the top of which a Stork has taken up residence.

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