Yilankale: our first outing

YILANKALE CASTLE

Our first outing beyond the Alley and beyond the village was to a castle 45 miles east of Adana.

At this time since I have learned how, I will include a link to a map of Turkey so you can remember where we are.

http://www.turkeytravelplanner.com/Maps/RegionsNCities.html I will find a better map soon.

After spending our first week and a half cooped up in a hotel room (again...it seems we spent most of our summer in some hotel room or another), we joined up with some friends and jumped in their 10 passenger rental van and went off to Yilankale (see link below for history) http://www.turkeycentral.com/articles/featured_article.php?article_id=56 for an afternoon hike. Yilankale or "snake castle" was built by the crusaders in the 11-12th century.

While we were there I remarked to Johannes how interesting it was that in our travels, and mostly withour planning, we had been able to see King John's castle (of Robin Hood fame)in Ireland and in a remote are of Turkey see a crusaders' castle of the same era. Although it is considered a part of the dark ages, I really find the era of the 11-14th centuries interesting as we have so much of our modern (primarily Anglo-Saxon and Norman, though not exclusively) folklore and legends coming out of this period. And it really was the foundation upon which the Renaissance rests. Anyhow...

So we went up to Yilankale for a hike. For about a week prior to this Arcadia and our friends' girls had been playing at the neighborhood park (Arkadas Park) which has great rock climbing wall. So the girls had been doing some climbing and thinking themselves very excellent rock climbers and tough girls at that. So we go the castle, and when we get there we see a nice paved path and we are a little disappointed, but think "oh well" and put Matthijas in the umbrella stroller. But it turned out, that just up over the first little hill, things got very rocky. So, we left the stroller at the bottom and started to hike. Well, scramble may be more appropriate. We were a bit worried about the girls at first until they rallied together telling us that they were tough rock climber girls and they would race up the hill leaving those of us attached to babies behind.

As you can see from the pictures it was a perfect Crusader's castle. On a huge hill overlooking a fertile valley and a healthy river (Cayhan), it screams "put a castle on top of me!". The last climb up into the caslte itself got very steep so I stayed below with Matthijas (we had heard of a very dangerous hole, somewhere, that a little boy had fallen into not too long ago, and although he wasn't hurt, it was no fun) so that we could be

safe and throw pebbles.
Johannes and Arcadia continued up the steep cliff and were able to explore inside the castle. As you can see they found a nice domed room and the two of them were pretty proud of themselves when they reached the lookout tower.

After our hike we stopped off at the small restaurant at the bottom of the hill and we all tested out some new cookies and drank lots of cherry juice (always a favorite of mine since Poland) and Yedigun which is Turkish orange soda.

The girls all had a great time (though our friends' grandma was a little nervous about all of the rocks and wind), and it was nice to finally get off base and feel like we were in authentic Turkey (rather than the Americanized Turkey that is "the Alley" right of base in the village.