A week later I head south to the Mediterranean to look into recent archaeological discoveries on the Turquoise Coast, so called for the transcendent blue-green hue of the Mediterranean here. 
I’m hoping to find real people in the archaeology. In the week since I was at the museum, I’ve done some research into Inanma. It turns out that she was a Sumerian goddess, something I would have figured out sooner had the museum used the more common spelling of her name, Inanna, or gotten immediately had she been called by her famous Akkadian name: Ishtar. She is the goddess of love, fertility, and war. She loves hot sex and bloody battles. She will bone you senseless, but if you try to leave her she will hunt you down like the dog you are.
You find that sort of hot, don’t you?
Both the “Oldest Love Poem” and “Inanma Prefers the Farmer”—more familiar as “The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi”—are mythology texts describing boisterous shaggings that were the template for keep-the-crops-growing fertility rites between priestesses standing in for Inanma/Inanna/Ishtar and kings or said priestesses and select young men. (If someone trots out something ostensibly feminist about the ancient tradition of “sacred whores,” there’s a good chance they’re talking about these rites.)
I find myself disappointed. I wanted Inanma to be a real person. Sure, you can glean a remarkable amount about a culture through its mythology, but I wanted Inanma to be just a little more mundane. I wanted her to prefer the farmer to the shepherd because of the quality of his flax or the chubbiness of his lambs, not because of the human need for metaphor to explain the changing of the seasons. I wanted her to have been someone who was born and then died, someone who was not the representation of something but the real thing herself. A single life unimaginably different in its details yet essentially the same as mine.
What’s strange about this urge is that I’ve been spending most of my time in Istanbul lingering over mezze and raki with flesh-and-blood people whose lives essentially fit the bill. Dogan, with his 43-hour work days and dream to become a historian specializing in early-20th-century Istanbul. Sercin, with her ongoing decryption of the bureaucratese on the U.S. Diversity Visa application form. Bahar, with her rowdy batch of photographer friends knocking back wine in a gallery where modern-day gypsies stare out from exquisitely beautiful photos. Fulya, with her memories of the 1999 earthquake that destroyed Izmit, her hometown, and killed so many people she knew. Mine, with her daily deadlines for Aksam and the longer piece about the occurrence of the year 2012 in apocalyptic literature.
We have different perspectives and histories and cultural backgrounds. Yet there is never a shortage of ways to understand each other. So why leave Istanbul for Antalya? Why leave now with the living for then with the dead?
Maybe it’s because I know the living don’t have any more answers than I do. Or maybe I’m full of shit and just want to drive a car for a week. Actually, all of these things can be true at once.
So I take a 12-hour bus from Istanbul to Antalya, where I rent a car and hit the road.
