Some Turkish Towns

So, I'm scrambling up the days, and I'm also having to be careful what I post. But, here goes - some shots of Antalyan towns:

We walked along this to get to an ancient bridge

If I remember correctly, this was an old flour mill. I tend to refer to it as "the creepy abandoned building we had to walk through to get to the bridge". 

This next picture is, according to the guides, a statue of Ataturk, the first president of the Republic of Turkey. He wanted Turkey to be a mostly-secular country (as far as the government goes), and modernized Turkey after the Ottoman Empire fell apart (it still amazes me that WWI is removed from the Roman Empire by only two empires). The current president, Erdogan, has been moving the country away from a secular government and towards a strongly Muslim government. According to the guides, seeing statues of Ataturk in some of these rural towns was an indication that the citizens there are less than happy with Erdogan's actions.

I don't remember what town that was in, and nor could I spell it if I did remember (and it's not just that Turkish is hard for me to spell - it has letters that don't exist on an American keyboard. If I were dedicated enough, I could figure out how to make them with the fancy key combinations, but ... some other time). 

Anyway, moving on:

This was the side of a mosque that once had spolia in it. The spolia are now in a museum in Istanbul.

Looking over some farmland

Looking over a city

I believe this was emergency shelter after a storm... but I'm not entirely sure about that.

This is a mosque in one of the towns we visited. As I was taking this picture, an older gentleman came up to me and began speaking very enthusiastically to me. Of course, I can't understand Turkish at all, and he doesn't speak any English, so I had no clue what he was talking about. Because Americans tend to be touchy about taking pictures of some things, I was afraid I wasn't supposed to take the pictures, but he was smiling, and when I showed him the pictures on my phone, he seemed pleased. Later on, one of the ladies on the trip said that she thinks he was proud his town had something so beautiful and he wanted to tell me about it. That makes sense in hindsight, because the only word that I recognized was "muezzin", which is the man who stands at the top of the minaret (that tower) and calls out the daily prayers. 

This was a woven reed mat a lady showed us

So yes, those are some of the pictures of smaller Turkish towns. 

Now, just for fun, here are some pictures of Izmir (which is definitely not smallish):

I'm pretty sure this is the Freemasons symbol.

Looking across the bay