Turkey sits at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, a region historically known as part of the Levant. It’s a place that National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek was keen to pass through on his Out of Eden Walk — a multi-year project in which he’s retracing the physical path of human migration.
When The World recently caught up with him, Salopek recalled his time walking through the Levant and shared more with Host Marco Werman.
Marco Werman: Paul, let’s start by orienting our maps, since we’re going back in time to 2014. You walked through Turkey in that year, a few years into your journey, where had you been just before arriving in Turkey, and what direction were you walking in?
Paul Salopek: So, as you know, Marco, my project began in one of the cradles of humankind. I started in the Rift Valley of Africa, in the country of Ethiopia, took a camel boat across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, walked through the deserts of Saudi Arabia, and then walked through the mountains of Jordan, crossed the West Bank into Israel. And then, because of the gigantic civil war in Syria at the time, ended up taking a ship across the Mediterranean to begin the walk across eastern Turkey, or Anatolia.
That perspective is important, especially in this case, because, in the minds of many people, this whole region — from Turkey down to the Sinai — is known as the Levant. It’s a French word meaning “rising,” as in the rising of the sun. How did that emerge as its moniker?
This is a very Eurocentric term, right? So, your Western Europeans would look to the east. And so, that’s where this comes from. Going into very deep history, if you remove the kind of Eurocentric cellophane layer, this was a crossroads, the birthplace of agriculture, the birthplace of these three big monotheistic religions and basically a contested ground between three jealous gods and a lot of strongmen that goes back millennia, not just centuries.
So, going into Turkey, I’m imagining you had a lot to focus on. There’s geography, there’s history, there’s archeology. What was your plan?
So, I landed at the port of Mersin, and the plan was to walk eastward. I, too, was headed toward sunrise, eventually hoping to head into Asia. What I was dimly aware of at the time is that it, too, was very contested ground between the Turkish government and a long-simmering ethnic Kurdish, kind of, separatist movement. So, there were tensions when I was walking through.
We’ve spoken in the past about hospitality and your experience of being welcomed into strangers’ homes. What about Turkey and some of the people you met there, and the time you spent with them?
Incredibly warm. I remember I started walking across Anatolia, that part of Turkey, in midsummer. It was blisteringly hot. And I was walking with my Turkish walking partners and a mule. When we were getting to villages, people would say, “Hey, guys, come on up and have a tea with us.” And often, I slept on rooftops. People were sleeping on rooftops to [escape] the heat. So, I was kind of camping on rooftops day to day. It was like a communal sleeping, you know, everybody was in cots and there’d be some chitchat under the stars. And then in the morning, get up and head to the next village. It actually was lovely. It was very nice.
As you mentioned earlier, you had to detour around Syria. It was an intense and tragic time for many people in the Middle East. Turkey is right next door to Syria, which was engulfed in that bloody civil war. How did that shape your travel plans aside from having to take that boat?
Well, in a huge way. Because Syria is such an important civilizational center for culture in the world. It was one of the endpoints of the Silk Road. It was one of the endpoints of these incense trails coming up from the Arabian deserts. It had a very vibrant culture and economy of its own. But, as you mentioned, it was in the grip of a bloodbath. And I knew I was inching close to the Syrian border. Because there are just refugees everywhere. There are people living under tents. And in that case, I lived under tents with them.
Yeah, and it wasn’t confined to Syria. Things spread across the border, and at one point, you were walking very close to the Turkey-Syria border when you had a pretty scary encounter. Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, one of the things that sticks out from that particular part of the trail is that lots of refugees were spilling over the border, and Turkey was deploying its army to kind of control and channel them. My walking partner, our mule and I got ambushed. People thought we were ISIS, that we were jihadists who had infiltrated from Syria. And so, guys popped up out of this rocky plain with guns, and we held up our hands and they marched us to their village. It was a little bit dicey there for a while. Yeah, we had to do a lot of talking to clear things up.
What was the argument you and your partner eventually made that got you out of their clutches?
We basically just patiently showed them our documents, explained our contacts. There was a funny moment when they were pointing their guns at us at the very beginning, where they were shouting at us, “You guys are jihadists, you’re ISIS,” and my walking partner, Murat Yazar, put his hands up and shouted back, “How can I be ISIS? I’m an atheist.” And I turned to him and said, “Murad, you just got us in even deeper trouble.”
We’re chuckling now, but it is an intense experience. It also contrasts sharply with what you experienced elsewhere in Turkey. I remember that Istanbul used to be Constantinople and was the center of the world. I’m really curious about when these otherwise cherished times in Turkey have reemerged elsewhere on your track.
You know, I often look back on that time as a very special time, Marco, because it’s a region of the world that, as we mentioned, is often unsettled. I remember talking to an archaeologist in Israel who was digging into the origins of Jerusalem, for example, and let’s say, for the moment, that this is part of the bigger picture. He said, there are 700 distinct conflicts recorded since the origins of Jerusalem back in the Bronze Age. And I walk through just between two very difficult kinds of conflicts. A year after I left Turkey, major battles broke out across the landscapes I had walked through, which I hold very precious in memory. These are kind of golden landscapes of hills, olive groves and very friendly villagers. I don’t think I would be able to do it had I gone just a year later or two years later.
Do you ever rub your eyes just noting the coincidence and the window that you slip through?
Yeah, it’s just one of these quirks of timing and serendipity and that my project’s driven by accident. And it was just kind of an accident of time when the Turkish government and the Kurds had a very fragile ceasefire, and it was already falling apart when I was there. So yeah, it wasn’t this rare moment where a door opened along the global trail and shut behind me.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Writer and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000-mile storytelling trek across the world called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonders of our world, has funded Salopek and the project since 2013. Explore the project here. Follow the journey on X at @PaulSalopek, @outofedenwalk and also at @InsideNatGeo.
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