The road inland to Dereagzi from the Mediterranean coast began as a robust tarmac thoroughfare, but slowly it disintegrated. Soon cracked pavement masqueraded as road, and this jarringly segued into limestone rubble and, finally, pockmarked dirt. I was driving a Fiat Albea, a car that could generously be described as two-wheel drive, on a road designed for the trucks of the quarrymen blasting limestone blocks out of the hillsides on either side of the road. The road ran along southwestern Turkey's dry Demre River bed, and the map my travel companion, Kyle Jazwa '08, held indicated that the road crossed to the other side at some point. This traversal, it turned out, the road accomplished by plunging right into the empty riverbed, its outline barely delineated against the rest of the dry white stones. A few rivulets burbled through the dead river's course like marrow draining from bone and submerged the "road" at intervals. We drove up to one such rivulet; it was not bridged. We pulled over. A truck passed and forded the rivulet easily as we watched.

"We could probably clear it," I said, as Kyle and I gauged the obstacle. The water was just shy of a foot deep at its most perilous point. I had driven the Fiat across a very wide swath of this very wide country, sometimes through hamlets where children and chickens ran amok in the streets, sometimes up dirt-paved mountain switchbacks with no guardrails.

"I don't know..." Kyle's apprehension was also well founded. The car was a rental and Kusadasi, the city we had rented it in--the city we had to get back to--was six hundred miles away. The car also had a manual transmission, which I had learned to drive three days earlier as Kyle and I prayed our way out of Kusadasi, using the appropriate apologetic driver gesticulations whenever we stalled at a busy intersection or in a roundabout. We did not learn "reverse" until our second day on the road, when a local demonstrated it for us as our car foundered in a driveway. Kyle and I both now imagined the Fiat swirling dolefully downstream into the Mediterranean. Neither of us was quite sure how to proceed at this juncture.

The author and the Fiat, both completely out of their element.

*     *      *

Junctures, both physical and cultural, are a common feature of Turkey. Most towns cluster around one or two intersections, more often teeming with vendors, goats, and other peripatetic specters of town life than cars and vans. Bazaar-keepers exist at the confluence of a millennia-old method of hawking wares and a twenty-first century inventory: DVDs, checkered blazers, and strips of Cialis pills. And of course, they'll meet you in the middle of their highball prices and your lowball return offers. The Turkish language matches an Arabic tongue with a Latin script. Turkish culture has crisscrossed Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Western European paths. And, of course, there sits Turkey itself, one foot in the West, the other in the East, flanked on one side by Greece, on the other by Iran.

Midday on Istanbul's Uzuncarsi Caddesi (Longmarket Street), where Turks, rather than tourists, shop.

It is at this nexus of Europe and the Middle East that Turkey has always found itself situated, a stance rendering it rarely comfortable, but always crucial, in world affairs. Indeed, Turkey is poised to become one of the most pivotal nations in the geopolitical power theater of the twenty-first century; Istanbul, astride two continents, is literally at the fulcrum between East and West. Fast-growing, well-armed, modernizing, and in the "developed" camp according to the CIA, Turkey is a dynamo in almost every measurable way. Right now, Turkey is in the laborious legwork stages of joining the European Union, having first applied for full-fledged membership in 1987, back when the EU was called the European Community. But Turkey--try this analogy on for size--has stalled on the banks of EU accession, much like me, Kyle, and our brown subcompact car hemming and hawing along the Demre River crossing. Turkey has been at this juncture for twenty long years, watching smaller and poorer countries apply for, sing and dance for, and finally gain admission to the EU in far less time.

In this position, Turkey will either bridge the divide and enter, effectively, Europe, or be sent swirling back to its inescapable Middle Easternness, rejected and deflated. And yet there is, of course, a third option: Turkey could eschew the whole EU process and go it alone in pursuing the bright goals of its future.

The Onion's Our Dumb World atlas waxes satirical on a number of Turkey's peculiarities, but none more so than its desire to be in the EU: grouped in with other Middle Eastern countries, the Turkey entry's subheading reads "Totally Out of This Atlas Section as Soon as the EU Accepts Them," and the citizens are described as "on their best behavior." Though the humor is in the exaggeration, Turkey is indeed entwined in numerous EU trade and travel arrangements, in addition to being a founding member of NATO. By many accounts, the people of Turkey want to be a part of Europe, or, perhaps more accurately, want to be European. In recent decades especially, the Turkish people have cast an Occidentalizing lens on their neighbors to the west, creating in popular Turkish discourse a myriad of Europes that are as much mirage as truth. All of these impressions of Europe are intensely colored by the Turkish perception of the European perception of Turkey. As Graham Greene wrote, "How strange it is to be liked. It automatically awakens a certain loyalty." Some Turks have exerted such loyalty prematurely, in the hope that the being liked part will follow. Nobel Prizewinner Orhan Pamuk, the most prominent international voice on the subject of what it is to be Turkish, describes the phenomenon:

"An expression I've heard in my upper-middle-class Westernized family since childhood: 'This is how they do it in Europe.' If they're drafting a new law on fishing, if you're choosing new curtains for your home, or hatching an evil plan against your enemies, utter these mysterious words, and you can bring any discussion of method, color, style, or content to an abrupt end."

He elaborates on the attitude: "'If a European saw this, what would he think?' This is both a fear and a desire. We are all afraid that when they see how we do not resemble them, they will castigate us." Pamuk wryly compares the obsession with Europe to Dostoevsky's impression of his fellow Russians. "Of Russians who read newspapers and magazines, who does not know twice as much about Europe as Russia?" And so in this spirit it was with great enthusiasm that most Turks greeted the initiation of EU membership talks in December of 2004.

The second time I visited Turkey was in November of 2005, while the pink cloud of finally achieving tangible progress toward EU accession still settled over Istanbul. A colleague and friend of my father's met me and the two other students I was traveling with at the Dolmabahce Palace, the seat of the Ottoman Sultanate from 1853 until its deposal in 1922. (The palace is a study in the sumptuary excess of absolute rule, but unlike its predecessor, Topkapi Palace, it is not an architectural mélange of Islamic and European styles; rather, its adornment is lifted almost exclusively from the baroque and rococo playbooks, and it very much resembles Versailles.) My father's friend, an enthusiastic and generous man, is not a typical Turk, as he is affluent, cosmopolitan, and at the head of an aerospace company with many international ties--as Western as they must come, I figured. And so I was caught off-guard when he told me, as we dined at a way-out-of-my-league restaurant, "Many Turkish people do not think that joining the EU is the best course of action for Turkey's future."

View from the Bosporus of the Dolmabahce Mosque (1855) and the Ritz Carlton, Istanbul (2000).

His statements then have only become more realized in Turkish sentiment since. As Turkey's efforts to join the EU have been hampered by, among others, Greek Cypriots upset at Turkey's longstanding refusal to recognize Cyprus's sovereignty, French and Austrian Christians, and semantics-haggling humanitarians demanding that Turkey call a genocide a genocide (that is, the Armenian genocide, which predated the rule of the modern Republic of Turkey), poorer and less developed countries have gained access into the fold. Bulgaria and Romania were admitted into the EU in January of 2007. Bulgaria has, of course, a lower GDP than much-larger Turkey, but also even a lower per capita GDP. And Romania has staked the better part of its tourism industry on the glorification of a bloodthirsty tyrant who terrorized his kingdom with an impaling rod! (And lest anyone forget, Germany was a founding member of the future EU just twelve years after its citizenry stood idly by during that country's own dabbles in mass execution.) Croatia, which applied for EU member status in 2003, sixteen years after Turkey did, is on track to make the cut by 2010, while Turkey is expected to languish in membership debate purgatory for at least another ten years.

The reverse of what Graham Greene observed is also true: just as being liked evokes a certain loyalty, being disliked provokes resentment. Undoubtedly insulted and exasperated by the EU's proceedings, the Turkish public has begun to question more and more whether it want any part in it. Polls in mid-2006 showed that only 43% of Turks viewed the EU favorably, as compared with 60% six months prior, and only 35% trusted the organization, a drop-off from 50%. Pamuk, in another essay, observed such a mood shift (in 1998, in the thick of a similar period of frustration) from the frontlines: meals with his family during holidays.

"[My relatives] were all cursing Europe with one voice. The old interest in what Europe was; that had gone...The anger is real, and it comes from watching our negotiations with the European Union, seeing that for all our efforts to be Western, they still don't want us, discovering that they intend to dictate terms on democratic structures and human rights...[My relatives] say there is 'also' torture in the West. They say that the history of the West is full of oppression, torture, and lies. They say that Europe's real interest is not in human rights, but in its own advancement."

Pamuk concludes, "The optimistic Kemalists [acolytes of modern Turkey's Westernizing founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk] of my childhood holidays admired Europe's culture, its literature, its music, its clothes. Europe was the fountain of civilization! But in the seventy-fifth year of the Republic, it has come to be seen as a source of evil."

At this particular moment, as Turkey's inchoate EU bid nettles both Europeans and Turks, it seems as though the country's prospects for joining are imperiled. But the real question fewer seem to be asking is, does Turkey really stand to benefit in the long run from EU membership? Turkey would, for a time, enjoy a spike in streamlined trade opportunities, tourism, and influence on the European community. Indeed, the latter is a point that leads to especially tendentious debates, for Turkey's inclusion would automatically give it the second-highest number of Members in the European Parliament--and it is projected that Turkey's population will surpass Big Man on Continent Germany's by 2020. Already, Istanbul is the largest city in Europe.

But Turkey's size, influence, power, and fecundity as they exist now must give the observer of geopolitics pause for consideration: how does it follow, a postiori, that Turkey should have to kowtow to Europe, as it quite undeniably has? I would argue that, if anything, in the very long scheme of things, Europe could actually be an albatross around the neck of Turkey. Turkey's annual population growth rate is 1.04%; the EU's as it currently stands, is 0.16%. A full quarter of Turkey's seventy million inhabitants are under the age of sixteen, which bodes well for the future. Turkey's economic growth rate (in terms of GDP) has similarly outpaced the EU's, at 8.2, 7.4, and 5.3% each year in the last three years. Compare with 2.4, 1.7, and 3.1% for the EU.

In some ways, Turkey even risks losses if it offers the obeisance the EU demands before it may join. The increased porosity of its borders would allow for the immigration of great numbers of Turks to other parts of Europe, in search of education or work; Turkey would do better to cultivate these opportunities at home instead. Furthermore, potentially restrictive and supposedly stabilizing policies that the EU could exert over the Turkish military--the second-largest in NATO--might hamper the progress of the modern, secular state. The army has aggressively checked Islamist power grabs in Turkish politics numerous times, most recently by ousting Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan in 1997. In the military arena, Turkey's subjection to the EU would be counterintuitive. Indeed, the EU stands more to gain from the arrangement in this respect, as a recent piece in The Age makes clear: "Advocates of the European Union as a fully fledged superpower have predicted that the addition of Turkey's military would make it a true global player...given Europe's lack of brawn."

Kyle Jazwa '08 picks his way toward a Lycian stone sarcophagus at the archaeological site of Pinara.

Turkey's development even in the last few decades has been astounding, regardless of the EU. Istanbul, a city of centers, suburbs, and exurbs, wears its growth like layers of sweaters and coats over its delicate historical and cultural center, Sultanahmet. Commuters take ferries to and from work across the Bosporus, tracing the same paths that supply ships and troop transports of Sultan Mehmet II cleaved as their commander tried to take Constantinople five hundred and fifty-five years ago. Trendy neighborhoods and housing developments now line the Asian coast of the strait. On my last day in Istanbul in April of last year, I sat in barefoot on the floor of the recently restored Church of the Myrelaion, thumbing through a sourcebook of scholastic information about the tenth-century Byzantine structure that a helpful custodial boy had given me. Pictures of the church from the 1960s revealed an eroding edifice sprouting weeds where windows once were, standing forlornly alone on a hilltop. Now, you cannot see the church from a block away, high-rises crowd it so closely.

Ultimately, growth rates and border disputes do not tell the full story of Turkey's EU woes and identity crises. Turkey's designs on Europe-hood are tied to far more intangible motives, cultural insecurities and delusions that date back to when the conquering Ottomans of 1453 found the architecture of the Byzantine Hagia Sophia to be pretty neat and soon put up the Blue Mosque right across the street, heavily indebted to the Byzantine style, but just a little bit bigger, taller, and grander than the earlier basilica. Now, with the tables somewhat turned, Turkish policy has been myopic, with EU membership as the logical conclusion of its path toward modernization that began in 1923 with the establishment of a Euro-style republican state.

But there is another way of looking at it. What may seem like a logical conclusion to modernization is really more of a reductio ad absurdum, the most extreme step Turkey thinks it needs to make to become a truly "modern" country. The fact that EU accession is seen as such a step reveals Turkish credence in an old construct wobbling on its last legs: the conflation of "modern" with "Western." Turkey need not embrace or be embraced by Europe to become a country for this century.

*     *      *

Turkey is not a European country. Though it is especially for reasons of culture and identity that many Turks want to join the EU--to join "Europe" in as official a way as possible--it is precisely in these respects that Turkey is not Europe. I was struck by this conflict many times in the course of my visits to the country. The population is ninety-nine percent Muslim. A secular country? Sure, but the five AM call to prayer echoing from the muezzin of any mosque in any town constantly and irritatingly reminded me of the religious nature of the people, especially outside Istanbul. In driving through Turkey's mountainous interior, Kyle and I drove past hamlets, comprised of wattle-and-daub hovels, that could fit inside the space of an Econolodge. As often as not, even these would boast one modest but shiny and new-looking structure: a mosque.

The history that underpins the place and people that constitute what is now Turkey is not European either, not entirely anyway, and it is part and parcel of what makes casting a discrete "Turkish" identity such a futile effort. The land is a palimpsest; its story is simultaneously one of stable power and contentious flux--Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks, Mongols, and Ottomans have all staked out empires here.

The second-century AD Roman Hildirlik Tower stands sentinel over the resort beaches of Antalya.

It is perhaps ironic then that the vestiges of these civilizations--today's tourist spots--are the touchstones of the way Turks project their version of Westernness, as these are the nodal points of Turkish interactions with visiting foreigners. In the region around Kusadasi, from where buses of sun-burnished cruise ship passengers visit more of what's left of the Romans at Ephesus, Pergamon, and Miletus than one can see in Rome, there are chains of bufes. These are combination rest stops and All U Can Eat buffets for lunching tourists traveling in packs. The tables are long and the food is inedible, all graying vegetables and fruit too long off the vine. Turkish people do not eat at such places, but the implication of these establishments is clear: we Turks too understand the consumptive mentality of fat Americans and Britons, and we too can match your disgusting amenities. In the south of the country, still the domain of slightly more intrepid tourists, Kyle and I encountered versions of this misplaced "we know what you Westerners want to see" attitude as well. Sometimes it was benign, as when our hostel in Fethiye offered a so-called (but certainly moniker-worthy) "Sexy Dinner" of grilled chicken, or the way in which the high-altitude ruins of Termessos are billed as the "Macchu Pichu of Turkey." Sometimes the result was absurd: out in front of the Church of St. Nicholas, built in the celebrity saint's hometown of Myra probably in the ninth century, stands a truly ridiculous statue of a right jolly old elf, bearded and decked out in red from his head to his toe. The saint presumably would have been rolling in his grave to see that, had his tomb not been smashed and his remains carted off by Venetian pirates a thousand years ago. In at least one case, the modernization came at a great price to the archaeological record: the very intact remains of Roman baths at a site called Allianoi, unique in the archaeological world, are slated to be flooded soon, once the construction of a nearby dam is complete. Sure, these are the scattered observations of one traveler, but there is truth in what the itinerant Henry Adams wrote of "millions of wanderers, who perhaps alone have felt the world exactly as it is."

Rush-hour traffic in the coastal Mediterranean town of Kalkan.

Modern Turkish culture is a hybrid culture as well. Kyle and I, coming off four or five days of intense travel, ventured out to a bar in the rustic resort town of Kas. Underage Turks chatted, laughed, and drank Efes, Turkey's ubiquitous pilsner. The DJ played Deep Purple's "Highway Star" and a few other American tunes to an indifferent crowd. But when the strain of pop autochthonous to the country rang out of the speakers, the young crowd went crazy. Pop music there has elements alluding to the stuff being played in clubs around the world, yet it is emphatically Turkish. Singers wail like imams and rap in the same song; strings and woodwinds flicker over bass loops. Par for the course is the duo CanKan, which, as the only tape Kyle and I purchased, served as the soundtrack to our road trip. Their sound is as I have described. Their look--think N'Sync at an S&M parlor.

The purpose of my most recent trip to Turkey was to study Middle Byzantine archaeology. The result was fifty pages of text and thirty pages of pictures fronted by the title "Resolving the Lycian Cross-Domed Basilicas at Dereagzi and of St. Nicholas in Myra in the Middle Byzantine Ecclesiastic Architectural and Historical Traditions" and a picture of Santa Claus. The folks I was studying were part of a culture on the ropes twelve hundred years ago. And yet traces of them are everywhere--my professor, Jeremy Rutter in the Classics Department, said that if, as an archaeologist, he could do it all over again, he'd have worked on excavations in Turkey instead of Greece--as are traces of the Romans, Ottomans, and the rest. The reflection of history with all its paradoxes is as much in the museums as in the marketplaces, in the clubs where you can get a hooker as in the restaurants where you can't get a beer (Islamic law).

A statue of Saint Nicholas of Myra, who lived in the fourth century AD.

As Bill Clinton noted when he came to Dartmouth earlier this term, Turkey is a terribly important country on the world stage today as an emerging power as much in dialogue with Greece as Iran. And there are still many regards in which "modern" and "Western" dovetail. In fact, Turkey is not unlike the United States in its way. The Turkish military is a strong and focal part of its government. Religion plays a complicated role in a nation of believers still struggling to determine just how much the stuff should influence the policies of government. Turkey's stakes in the Middle East are, of course, high, and, at this moment, the opinions of quite a few Turks toward Europe are colored by resentment and alienation. I suspect that culturally as well as strategically, Turkey's kinship with the U.S. will only increase. But as for the EU, Turkey does not need it. Taken together, in terms of being in Europe, of Europe, and served in the long term by tethering itself to Europe, Turkey is less European than Canada.

*     *      *

Though I was the driver throughout the whole trip ("Something something insurance something," Kyle mumbled his excuse for getting to doze his way across Turkey in the passenger seat.), we ultimately followed Kyle's choice to ditch the rental car at the rivulet and hike. After twenty minutes of this in the midday Mediterranean sun, we were ready to hitch a ride. The only passing trucks belonged to shepherds and quarrymen. We hailed one. The driver wore a turtleneck shirt and designer sunglasses, perhaps a quarry foreman.

"We're trying to get to Dereagzi." I said. No comprehension--his second language was German, not English. "Kilise. Church."

What remains of the basilica at Dereagzi, probably built in the tenth century AD.

He drove us out to the unmarked ruins, some twenty kilometers from where we had parked. We had yet to slog through knee-deep mud in order to run measuring tapes across ghost outlines of the apsidal walls of a crumbling church. But in that moment, as Kyle and I got out of the pickup truck, there existed in the space of a few hundred meters in an empty stretch of rural Turkey: a center of Christian worship and authority from over a millennium ago, a round and weather-beaten woman scolding a flock of bleating sheep through alcoves that once held liturgical treasures, a bilingual man in a Toyota truck with three cell phones on the dash, and two American college juniors humming CanKan songs.

Galata Tower (1348), still oversees Beyoglu, Istanbul's modern shopping and entertainment district.