We began noticing them on the drive from Inebolu to Sinop: single-story timber structures raised from the ground, supported by what look like rough-hewn tables you might see in a cowboy theme-y bar. Storage facilities of some sort, we reasoned, something along the lines of the rice barns that dot the landscape in Thailand and Indonesia.
Turkey's Black Sea coast is corn country (though plenty of wheat is grown there too). In autumn nearly every rural house is festooned with bunches or garlands of drying cobs. These "corn barns", which we later learned are called ambar (a generic term for "storehouse"), is where farmers dried and stored their harvested corn (and other crops) while they waited for their turn at the village mill. In an ambar crops were safely out of the reach of the wild boar and other hungry animals that roam the region's forested hills. Now most sit empty.
After days dogged by gray skies, confined by unceasing rain to our hotel room or to one or another of Sinop's harborside teahouses, we were bug-eyed. When we woke one morning to tentative sun we dressed and breakfasted hurriedly, jumped in the car and hit the road.
We drove inland, away from the sea we'd been staring at for the better part of a week, and traced a two-lane blacktop deep into a bucolic valley. Here and there were the tinest of villages consisting of a single bufe (always well-stocked with freshly baked bread) and a handful of cottages. Plumes of smoke rising from gardens signalled pekmez in process: mothers and grandmothers cooking kilos and kilos of apples, pears, mulberries, figs and grapes into liters and liters of fruit molasses.
Alongside a river slicing through a middling mountain range trees were just beginning to show autumn colors. We breezed by a mid-sized town and kept on, beyond the point at which the road became a pitted dirt track. Lured by the vista around the next corner, and the next, we negotiated hairpin turn after hairpin turn.
There were ambar, plenty of them; by now we were a bit obsessed with these structures. When the road narrowed to nearly impassable we stopped at the base of a hill crowned by an especially handsome specimen and got out for photos.
While Dave was shooting a window on the facade of what we'd taken to be an abandoned farmhouse opposite the ambar banged open. A red kerchiefed head popped out and we were assaulted with a half-growl, half-shout: "Who's there? What are you doing?"
I shouted back that we were just taking photographs of her ambar; she looked dubious and slammed the window shut. A few moments later she emerged from the front door and toddled over to the gate, arms swinging.
"It's gorgeous! He's a photographer."
I indicated the corn barn, tyring to explain why we'd hiked up a hill and on to her property, as she glared at me from beneath formidable brows. To tell the truth she scared me a little. Then, quite suddently, the clouds parted. Her face didn't soften, exactly, but she invited us in for tea.
Superlatives simply cannot express the beauty of her house, which her husband later told us was built of beechwood, by his father, over 60 years ago. We entered a dark ground floor layed with stone, a storage area for tools and bags of recently harvested walnuts and hazelnuts and, long ago, cattle and sheep and chickens.
Ladder stairs -- the steps, made of 2-inch thick boards, so solid underfoot -- led to an entry area. To the left was a curtained kitchen nook recently updated by her son, with a marble countertop, new sink and taps and handcarved wood bench. Two bedrooms lay straight ahead. One was empty save for a cloth spread over the floor; it was covered with drying corn kernals. Timber walls were draped with old kilim and thick cotton cloth.
Habiba -- after a while I felt bold enough to ask her name -- led us into a sitting room brightened by two windows, one with a fine view down the hill we'd just snaked our way up, and directed us to a low cushioned bench along one wall. Outside it was cold enough to require gloves and heavy wool socks but the room was toasty warm from a wood-fired stove set inside a five foot-high blackened hearth. She left us there to admire the timber walls, gleaming from age and smoke, and returned with a metal canister of water and a container of tea leaves.
We talked about her family -- three sons and a daughter, all grown and living Istanbul. Grandkids too, and they all converge on the village every summer to take in the fresh air and cool temperatures. As she talked Habiba loosened up a bit. She was 64 or 65, she said, she couldn't be sure. She'd grown up in the area, she loved these hills: "You should see it in springtime!"
We must eat something, she insisted, even though it was past lunchtime. We declined out of politeness, Habiba persisted, and we gave in. While she was in the kitchen her husband Kazim returned home. Upon opening the door to find two yabanci drinking tea in his sitting room he looked shock, but graciously and quickly regained his composure. He offered us more tea.
Kazim and Habiba set up a low folding table in front of us, laid it with a flowered cloth and set it with plates of food. Kazim ate with us (Habiba demurred, saying she'd already eaten): tomatoes, long green mild peppers, cheese and gently pickled romano beans that Habiba warmed in oil over a burner on the wood stove. Tea for him, orange Fanta for Dave and me.
As the three of us ate Habiba pulled hunks of bread from a big loaf she kept in a plastic bag on a shelf near the door. She carefully peeled warm hard-boiled eggs and placed them on our plates.
Kazim told us about growing up in the house, how he was seven years old when his father built it with his own hands. He described a village more populous than it is now, the mosque just minutes from their door packed with the faithful every Friday afternoon (it's now closed). He told us about the mill down by the river where his father and the other farmers took their corn to be ground into grits and flour. How his mother made meals in the hearth that now houses the modern wood-fired stove, and how as a boy he listened to the family's cows and the sheep and chickens moving beneath the floorboards as he drifted off to sleep. Every autumn, he said, the ambar was stacked to its rafters with corn and other fruits of the harvest.
He and Habiba adore each other. It's lovely to see. When she checked his watch and pulled a sack of pills from beneath her sweater -- ''I was in the hospital last month, for few days," she murmured -- Kazim watched her worriedly. When we heard the clank of a jerryrigged oil can bell, hung just outside the house to scare animals away from the garden, Habiba shook her head, smiling sideways at Kazim, and said "That's his work." He shrugged his shoulders and smiled back.
Every year in late autumn the couple slaughter their few chickens, pack them up along with bushels of hazelnuts and walnuts and board an overnight bus to Istanbul, where they spend the winter with their family. And not necessarily willingly -- when they were younger, Kazim told us, they stuck out the cold and the snow in the old house. "No more though. There's no taxi, no bus to go into town. Sometimes no electricity. It's too isolated. We enjoy Istanbul but ...."
After finishing our late lunch we stayed for two glasses of tea. Habiba looked tired and Kazim began clucking after her; it was time to leave. They walked us downstairs, Kazim taking quiet but obvious pride in the fact that Dave stopped to photograph the house's wood beams and planks and its storage area, where the baskets Kazim and Habiba use to collect walnuts and apples hung on hooks jutting from the walls. He understood why we'd been drawn to the ambar. "Yes, it's beautiful," he said.
Neither Kazim nor Habiba wanted their photograph taken. "We're too old and too ugly!" she cried, shooing Dave away but smiling when he tried to convince her otherwise.
"Come back in the spring, in May, after we return from Istanbul," Habiba said us as she urged a bulging bag of black walnuts into my hands."This place in the springtime, oh! You can't imagine how wonderful it is. Like heaven on earth."
