As I’ve often remarked, one of the things I love about being here is the faithful return of certain events — moments — throughout the year. Of course there are events everywhere upon which one may confidently depend — tax deadline day comes to mind — but I’m talking about here.
One occurrence which is so predictable that I don’t even have read the paper, much less even wake up, to recognize it is the double-edged event known as THE EXODUS.
Trieste is only 7 km/4 miles from the Croatian border. From then on, time and distance take on new meanings.
No, it has no Biblical overtones, unless one is thinking of the famous Plagues. In fact, now that I think about it, this could possibly be a worthy candidate to join the frogs and the flies that afflicted Pharaoh. But since we’re living in a democracy, this little plague afflicts everybody going on vacation. And everybody goes in August.
So the first weekend of August inevitably sees an outbound migration of massive proportions clogging the highways — The Exodus. On the last weekend of August, there is the equally appalling Return Exodus.
This is what Croatia looks like from the Italian side of the border. You can be sitting and looking at this for quite a while. But of course, you're not seeing this, you're seeing what it represents: Fabulous beaches, great food, maybe even no people.
We could call it the Plague of Traffic. Or, if you’re sitting on the highway in a monster backup, the Plague of Everybody Else on Earth. And the only thing that changes from one year to the next is the length — from unbearable to inconceivable — of the backups at the Italian borders and Alpine tunnels. Last Saturday the backup at the border dividing Slovenia from Croatia reached about 40 km/25 miles. Ah yes, Croatia: Gorgeous! Near! Irresistible! Cheap! Also: Small! Mountainous! Not Many Roads!
This Exodus traffic is funny to people who aren’t there, like me, and to people who are funny wherever they are, like Lino Toffolo.
Lino Toffolo is an actor/standup comic from Murano who writes a column every Sunday in the Gazzettino. He’s usually right on top of the main subject of the day, which last Sunday was The Exodus.
Here is what he wrote (translated by me):
Instead of facing the usual five kilometers of tailback [in Italian, merely “tail”] to go to Jesolo, why don’t we go to Croatia or Dalmatia or along down there, where there are bound to be fewer people?
Perfect idea! Let’s go! 40 kilometers of continuous tailback! Basically, when the last person gets there he just turns around because his vacation is over.
Every year, right on schedule, other than the drama of the “checking the stomach on the beach I swear I’m never eating again” is the one — unsolvable — of “where to go” and above all, “when to leave.”
The imagination is unchained! At night, at dawn, at mealtimes like telephone calls [local people scribbling ads often say “call at mealtimes”]. Every so often somebody has the idea of the “intelligent departure,” which they reveal only to their friends who — as with all true secrets — they pass along to one friend at a time, even on Facebook.
The result: Everybody is stuck in the backup, everybody is complaining.
Grandpa Tony thinks that the laborers working on the highway are tourists who just got bored sitting still and figure this way they can at least be doing something…. Sometimes you can watch plants growing.
“But — it is obligatory for us to do this?” “No! That’s exactly why we’re doing it! If it were obligatory, we’d all stay home!”
And the Croatians? Where do they go? Italy? Gorgeous! Near! Irresistible! Expensive!
This is a glimpse of the Croatian coast. Worth the voyage, as the Michelin Guide might put it.
This is the Italian coast in Puglia.
Croatia.
Italy. The only difference I can see that might make it worthwhile to sit in a car for hours to get to one instead of the other would be that Croatia is currently a hot destination, while Puglia has always just been there.
Summer has so many regrettable aspects — heat, mosquitoes, tourists — but there is one aspect I always look forward to and that’s the special sort of dementia that overcomes people during this brief but intense — and hot — time of year.
I don’t know if the heat is to blame. Maybe these things also happen when the ice and chilblains move in and they just don’t get reported.
But here is what happened two days ago in Rome. I’m sorry it didn’t happen in Venice, though of course it could have. But I can’t let that detail stop me from telling about it.
An unnamed 37-year-old man was out on via Giorgio Morandi in the outlying area of the Eternal City called Prenestino. A quick check reveals that — according to someone — this used to be known as a Bad Neighborhood but by now that reputation is no longer deserved. Singer Claudio Baglione grew up here, if that helps you get a fix on its zeitgeist. Anyway,I’m just trying to provide a little context.
Back to the story.
Lana Marks makes only one "Cleopatra" bag a year. I'm just guessing that this is not the bag -- or the woman, speaking of Helen Mirren -- involved in this bizarre episode.
This unnamed man, walking along the via Giorgio Morandi, saw a woman, also walking along. She had a handbag. He wanted it. So he grabbed it.
This was not an entirely spontaneous act on his part (though heat and perhaps mosquitoes might have degraded his decision-making capacity) because as soon as he had the handbag he ran away. Not just anywhere, but to his getaway car where he had installed two accomplices. (Why two? Did he need a spare in case one broke down?)
Did I mention breakdowns? He leaped in the car, they gave it the gas (or benzina or gasolio or whatever they fed it) and prepared to zoom away.
But there was no zoomage. After a couple of yards, the car just sort of putt-putted to a stop. (Pause for the sound of shrieks and head-punching: “You were supposed to put gas in the car!” “I thought YOU were supposed to!” “I told YOU to do it!” etc. etc.). Anyway, the car is now stopped very, very close to the scene of the crime, and it’s not moving anymore.
So the handbag-snatcher realizes it’s he who’s going to have to move. Rapidly. And immediately. He leaps out of the car and begins to run.
However, these precious seconds, spent in going essentially nowhere, have given the passersby a chance to focus on him. So he’s running, but now other people are also running: After him.
This is bad. They’re gaining on him. Must take cover.
So he runs into a pharmacy.
"La Reunion" pharmacy in Havana looks like it could have hidden our man, for at least a while. But I'm assuming that the pharmacy in Rome, including its proprietors, weren't anything like this.
This could work, I suppose — he could stand there pretending to buy aspirin, or a truss, or some nicotine-replacement product. But standing in a small enclosed space that has only one door is not the best idea.
And here’s another bad idea: He was still holding onto the handbag.
Now let us turn to a recent study conducted at the University of Cambridge on the human brain. The researchers, led by neurobiologist Simon Laughlin, have concluded that the human brain has reached the limits of its intelligence — actually, the limits of its energy-capacity relative to its also limited space, kind of like our little hovel — and therefore can’t evolve any further.
It gets better: There’s no reason why it shouldn’t start losing intelligence, retreating under the inexorable pressure of everything involved in life on earth from playing “I Wanna Be The Guy” to getting your toddler to stop asking “Why.”
I wouldn’t have placed our 27-year-old failed Roman bag-snatcher in the “Our brains are too evolved to develop any further” category. But he’d make a superb candidate as an example for the “Our brains are evolving backwards toward the primordial alphabet soup” hypothesis.
They could do a study on him! First question: Is there anything in this room that reminds you of a lady’s handbag?
Somebody's brain. If it were of our aspiring thief, the left hotspot would be signifying "Grab that woman's bag!" The one in the middle is signaling "Flee! Abscond! Serpentine!" And the big one on the right is flashing "Bag? What bag? I don't see any bag. Oh this? It's my lunch. I always carry my liverwurst sandwich in a diamond-rimmed bag."
Would you like to know how to say “So big your mind vaporizes in front of it” in Turkish?
Answer: “Bogazici.”
In English it’s “Bosphorus,” which is actually Greek, but whatever you want to call it, you’ll say it standing at attention.
And we were out there on July 17, four of us from Venice and four Turkish men, in two gondolas, rowing across it.
Even from space the Bosphorus looks impressive, especially that little dog-leg to the left up there. That must be highly entertaining to the captains and pilots aboard the 55,000-some vessels that transit each year.
So what’s so big about it? In normal human terms, the world’s narrowest strait used for international navigation isn’t all that big. It’s about 31 km/17 nautical miles long and its maximum width is 3,329 meters/1.7 nautical miles and its minimum width is a mere 704 meters/.38 nautical miles. But unless you need to pilot a tanker of liquefied natural gas or something, these numbers don’t tell you its true dimensions.
When you row out onto it in a four-oar gondola, the whole concept of size suddenly multiplies in every direction. I knew there were currents and vortexes and so on, though Lino in the stern knew how to deal with them so I, rowing in the bow, didn’t pay much attention. But I didn’t know then that the Black Sea to the north and the Sea of Marmara to the south flow toward each other with differing densities, which forms an underwater river in the Bosphorus which, if it were on the surface, would be the sixth largest river (in volume, I presume) on earth.
It’s probably better I didn’t know that.
The Rumelihisari fortress was built by Sultan Mehmet II in 1451-52. The Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge is also named for him ("Fatih" means "Conqueror"). We were out there, smaller than any boat shown here, rowing back and forth in front of it, focusing on not being conquered by the waves. Photo: Sagredo
Carbing up before our first expedition onto the Bosphorus. The boats are waiting for us five minutes away, but we seem to be in no hurry.
What I did feel was not only the mass of water under us, I felt the mass of history bearing down on this strip of sea which by now is so heavy there ought to be a black hole there instead of mere water. It’s not every day I get to row around in front of a Turkish fortress built in 1451 to enable the Ottoman assault which conquered Constantinople in 1453.
And just for the record, Lino told me later than when we rowed out there, he had a lump in his throat, for the very same reasons I was listening to my brain spinning its wheels saying “I cannot believe I’m out here doing this.” The fact that he could get emotional is a great thing — and that he could be dealing with the throat-lump while also keeping track of the vortexes is even better.
Gondolas on the Bosphorus — how weird is that? Despite the fact that, somewhere back in history, there were plenty of boats our size being rowed all around here, we were thrillingly tiny. Under the soaring Fatih Sultan Mehmet suspension bridge the passing ocean-going tugboat and the double-decker tourist boats and the random tanker, all of which seemed to have three-million-horsepower motors and created waves the size of Quonset huts, made rowing a fairly unusual thing to be doing out here. Possibly the people aboard the aforementioned craft thought so too, though I’m not sure we even showed up on their radar. Certainly the tourists were excited to see us, waving and snapping pictures, though only God knows what they were thinking as we passed. They certainly weren’t thinking about the massive wake they were leaving behind them.
This is the Bosphorus at its peerless best. We are toiling toward the Bosphorus Bridge, the second of only two across the strait. The finish line was almost in sight (imagine applauding hordes to the right of the frame). Courtesy Olympic Committee of Turkey
So we were there just to be weird? Mais non, mon capitaine. Thanks to the collaboration of His Excellency Gianpaolo Scarante, the Italian Ambassador to Turkey, we were invited to be the opening number in the spectacle of the Bosphorus Cross Continental, an annual event organized by the Turkish Olympic Committee, the only swimming event in the world which involves two continents.
Some 1,200 swimmers plunge into the water like penguins off an ice floe from a dock on the Asian shore of Istanbul and swim to the European side, a distance of some 6 km/3.8 miles, with the bonus of having to turn around and do the last stretch against the current.
But Venetian boats in Istanbul? Of course there were plenty here when it was Byzantium, and plenty even after it became Constantinople. But given much of the history between Venice and Turkey, it was a very cool thing to be there all together — two Venetians and two Turks per boat — with absolutely no ulterior motive, like buying, selling, or slaying.
This map shows the path the swimmers follow. We started below the bridge at the top, at the little protuberance on the Asian shore called Kandilli, and finished somewhat above the next, a distance of about three kilometers/1.8 miles. It turned out to be not quite as easy as that might sound -- heat, breeze, and a gondola that seemed to weigh about as much as the USS New Hampshire made this little adventure a real calorie-incinerator.
Traffic is blocked for four hours to smooth the stage for the mob of Australian-crawlers (and the small pod of dolphins we saw arcing around the finish line). If delivery of your new plasma TV is held up, maybe you could blame it on this. In any case, we also benefited handsomely from this blockade, benefited, that is, until about ten minutes from the finish line, when two double-decker tourist boats carrying the swimmers upstream passed by. The swimmers waved at our brilliant strangeness and beauty but didn’t notice the wake. Our gondola stolidly took the three or four walls of water head-on — womp, womp, womp — but it isn’t good for the boat and it really slowed us down. When you’re panting to reach the finish line, hot and sweaty, being slowed down is intensely annoying. Still, compared to the gymkhana of yesterday, with waves from everywhere, it wasn’t so bad.
Lino’s and I, with Ata and Samet on the red-and-green gondola, finished second. I don’t say we lost, nor do I say the blue gondola won, because the boats were totally mismatched in several technical but telling details. Also, it wasn’t supposed to be a genuine race; Ata and Samet, and Burak and Mehmet, had only tried Venetian rowing twice in their lives, on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. It’s just that the desire to see no one in front of them overcame the sporting good sense of our adversaries. I didn’t care if they came in first. I did care that they did it by five or six boat-lengths.
Say what you will, I do not consider this a scene of effulgent sportsmanship. Courtesy Olympic Committee of Turkey
So what could be next? I’d be perfectly happy if we were to be able to do this again next year. Otherwise, unless we find a way to tackle the Bering Strait, or maybe the Strait of Malacca, I’m going to leave this experience in lonely splendor at the top of a list of one, labeled “If this doesn’t astound you, you must be completely missing your astound-o-meter.”
“]The wave may be gone but the effect lingers briefly. Courtesy Olympic Committee of Turkey(L to r): Erla Zwingle, Lino Farnea, Ata Sukuroglu, Samet Baki Uctepe of the red/green gondola. Burak Dilsiz, Mehmet Gokhun Karagoz, Cesare Peris, Dino Righetto of the blue gondola; H.E. Gianpaolo Scarante, Italian Ambassador to Turkey. We had no idea that at this very moment, the winner of the swimming competition had just reached the finish line -- and a Turk, as it happened -- an 18-year-old named Hasan Emre Musluoglu. And the Olympic Committee organizers did not give the tiniest sign of interrupting our little moment of glory until all the prizes were given and the snaps taken. There are extreme sports, and sometimes there is extreme sportsmanship, not to mention world-class class. I'm going to have to start learning Turkish. Courtesy Olympic Committee of Turkey.A more informal lineup: The two crews before our first session.
I have been very lax in updating our assorted adventures in assorted boats, and I apologize, but adventuring does take so much time and energy.
But I promise to give you a full account sometime next week — not long after our return from our next adventure.
Hint: Both adventures involve going to Turkey with two gondolas. And rowing them there, obviously. With four Turkish men (not so obviously, but the world is an amazing place and anyway, the Turks had just as many galleys as Venice did, in the old days, which by itself means they also had rowers, even if a lot of them were Christian slaves. Sorry, but there it is).
Both adventures require a huge shout-out to His Excellency Gianpaolo Scarante, the Italian Ambassador to Turkey, and his wife, Barbara, who raises the concept of “indefatigable” beyond any known scale of measurement. They are the reason we’re there, so I want to do my very best.
In late May, we went to a city named Eskesehir, which I discovered is a very important place indeed, not least for its being the homeland of meerschaum. (I’d never given much thought to meerschaum mines, but they’re all around that part of Turkey.) We rowed our two gondolas on the Porsuk river in a pair of races with the Turkish rowers.
In Eskesehir, the first race mixed the crews, as you can immediately detect here. The second race pitted a Venetian crew against a Turkish crew. A good time was had by all.
Now we’re headed to Istanbul, to row our gondolas across the Bosphorus. (I love saying that — it’s like saying “I’ll walk across the parking lot to the dry cleaner.”) We’ll be gone till the 19th; the event itself is on July 17, and is part of a very large and important amateur open-water swimming race called the “Bosphorus Cross-Continental Competition.” The swimmers start from the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus and finish on the European side. So will we, but an hour earlier.
We’re due to form up, as we did in May, with two Turks and two Venetians per boat (I’m operating under a Venetian alias, as you know), and race 2000 meters across the mythical strait between Kuleli and Kurucesme. I’m acting as if I know what that means; even though I’ve located them on the map, the scope of all this still hasn’t really reached me.
I do know that the fact that this is the first year of gondola participation, with Turkish rowers, has created no little enthusiasm — they are planning to install GPS’s on the gondolas so the race can be broadcast live on national Turkish television.
So there will be silence in BlogWorld here until I get back. Probably followed by a tremendous racket.
