Rediscovering Turkey’s northeast: a journey from Trabzon to Erzurum

Fifty years ago, on a Black Sea beach near Trabzon, in Turkey’s far northeast, the fire from a hastily assembled pile of driftwood blazed cheerfully in the dark, warming a panful of locally bought vegetables mixed with tinned beans from the stock in the back of our Land Rover, along with the remains of several suicidal moths that had been attracted to our dinner by the light.

Extra protein, we joked, four boys fresh out of school, opening bottles of Turkish beer to wash down the resulting mess. With typical teenage insouciance – and with 4,800km of driving across Europe from the English Midlands and many nights of illegal camping behind us – we felt invincible.

Or at least we did until three men with large guns stepped into the firelight.

Perhaps we should have expected this. At that time, the Black Sea was also bordered by several Soviet republics and Iron Curtain countries. Turkey had joined Nato, and had reason to be cautious.

When our visitors proved to be official rather than criminal, we produced passports, pantomimed our innocence, and with broken German as a lingua franca, invited them to eat.

They didn’t complain about the moths, and we parted on friendly terms.

In the mid-1970s, tourism to Turkey was in its infancy. Istanbul was distant, expensive and exotic. Although cruise ships sometimes stopped at Izmir, on the coast of the Aegean Sea, to bus passengers to the extensive Roman ruins at Ephesus, that was about the limit of most foreign investigations.

But we were nearly 1,450km further east, in territory that had been part of neighbouring Georgia until 1921, and travelling at a time when many of Turkey’s roads were still gravel at best. This was less a holiday and more of an expedition, partly inspired by British ex-military linguist Michael Pereira’s East of Trebizond, an engaging piece of long-form travel writing, rich with both facts and intimate observations, published in 1971.