This blog post contains none of our group’s science. If you clicked on it with the expectation of science, this is your only warning to go back :)
Even though our Lab Culture document explicitly mentions the importance of vacation and life outside, I have long suffered from my inability to take time off from work for myself and my family. When our lab moved from the United States to Germany in 2022, one of the items on my bucket list was to temper my workaholic lifestyle by adopting the European version of the ‘work hard, play hard’ culture.
I am not there yet. But this year I managed to take a two-week break, and do something I have been dreaming of for decades: going back to Barhal, the place which, of all the places on this planet, I associate myself with the most.
Barhal
Barhal is a village that is located at the very northeastern corner of Türkiye, stuck between mountains carved by cold, rapid rivers.
Valley of Barhal, with the Kaçkar Mountains in the background.
Barhal has always been far off the beaten path, and it had all the time in the universe to fine-tune its diverse fauna and unique culture with relatively little influence from the outside world. In fact, there were no roads to Barhal until quite recently, and electricity was scarce even up until the late 1990s. I was too young to witness the days of no roads. But I did personally experience the sparse access to electricity as I spent many nights in rooms illuminated by gas lanterns as a child in Barhal. Waking up with the first rays of the sun and going to bed around the time it set served as the most practical determinants of the boundaries of daily life in Barhal until much more recently than in most other places.
Government census data show that the population of Barhal in the 1980s was around 900 people (and local estimates suggest that it was a number much lower than the number of Eurasian bears that roamed the mountains surrounding Barhal even then). As of today, the number of people who live in Barhal year-round is fewer than 300 due to families migrating to bigger cities in Türkiye. I was not part of the generation that made the transition to city life and exchanged immediate access to pristine nature, and its harsh living conditions, for the convenience of the countless options to make a living that cities offered. I was part of the generation that came right after them, as my father was among the first bunch of people who took a leap of faith and made their way to Istanbul to work and study. As a result, I was born in a city. Completely without my consent. But to my father’s credit, he rectified his error by ensuring that I spent enough time in Barhal as a kid to grow some roots there.
It is safe to say that the entire village is my family due to centuries of cross-marriages between pretty much every other household. While there, I always felt that I was the child of the entire village and not a single family. I always had a very special connection to this hidden corner of the world and its people, yet my professional life made it almost impossible for me to visit Barhal as frequently as I would have liked, especially after science consumed me as a whole. So the primary purpose of this trip was to change that, and in that sense, it was quite a success. I wanted to write this blog post soon after my return to take some notes while my memories are fresh and share them with others.
Arrival
My family has multiple houses in this region at different levels of natural decomposition due to lack of use. Prior to the trip, I didn’t know if we could comfortably stay in any of them. So, to avoid any surprises, we booked some rooms at Karahan Pansiyon, an authentic guest house managed by some of the kindest people, who serve the most delicious food they cook right in front of you. Karahan Pansiyon is located near a monastery that was built around the year 900 by the people of Barhal who were then ruled by the Kingdom of Georgia who called this place Parkhali:
The 10th-century monastery.
I imagine that the changing rulers of this region from its very earliest days to the Kingdom of Georgia times and all the way to the Byzantine Empire, Ottoman Empire, and finally the modern Türkiye did not have much of an influence on how people lived here. But one thing is certain about this monastery: the villagers took good care of this structure throughout time, and it is as pristine and well-kept inside as it is on the outside:
Inside of the monastery, which has been used by the villagers as a mosque since the 15th century.
This gorgeous structure, literally from another millennium, now spends most of its days overlooking the local cemetery that serves as the final resting place for many who lived in this valley and those who left and found their way back, including my father.
My purpose was to spend most of my time in Barhal walking the paths I used to walk almost every day as a kid.
I always believed that my roots were in Barhal, but in reality I spent the majority of my life in places like Istanbul, New Orleans, Woods Hole, Chicago, and Oldenburg. I became a computer scientist and a software developer, used my hands in the most delicate fashion to create some of the most ephemeral products of technology that only lived on solid-state drives, one electromagnetic oddity from ceasing to exist completely. Endeavors I embarked upon couldn’t be any farther from milking cows, making cheese, cutting grass, fixing aqueducts, watering orchards, collecting cherries, pear, apple, and mulberries, turning them into molasses, cutting wood, turning them into tools and structures, shaving animals, turning them into clothes and rugs, building houses, keeping bees, making pots, and a million other things people of Barhal did daily to survive altogether throughout four seasons. Despite the astonishing irrelevance of my life’s trajectory and priorities to the routines of Barhal, not a single day of my life went by without me thinking about this village, revisiting my childhood memories of it, and simply missing that life.
Yet my experience of Barhal was a lifetime ago. Was I missing something that never existed the way I pictured it? According to neuroscience, this is not an overly paranoid consideration due to a phenomenon called ‘memory reconsolidation’.
Memory and Fidelity
Memory reconsolidation is an uncontrollable cognitive process that takes place every time we recall a memory, which leads to the distortion of the memory little by little over time.
The contemporary understanding posits that memories are not recordings that we play over and over again. Instead, the very act of retrieval and rendering of a memory makes it susceptible to distortion. This basically means that the more one revisits a memory, the less accurate it becomes compared to its original form, and it just keeps accumulating over time. What an absolute injustice. If you read about it you will see that it is well supported by both theoretical and empirical work in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, but I had first heard about this in a great podcast by Radiolab, Memory and Forgetting, which I would strongly recommend anyone who finds this topic interesting and wishes to further think about its implications.
Given that most of my memories of Barhal were from 35 years ago, you can see the reason behind my anxiety prior to my pilgrimage to Barhal. I mean, what could be a bigger disappointment for someone in my position than discovering, after a lifetime of longing for a place, that it was all just an echo of the overused neurocircuitry of my simple human brain?
Luckily, though, my first moments in Barhal was a resounding rejection of these conspiracy theories. I could see that everything was exactly as I remembered it.
The tiny bridge I crossed everyday in Catellar.
Who knows why. Perhaps it was the case because time does not march at the same pace in Barhal.
An place to keep animals and their food seen from the orchard I used to eat mulberries until I had digestive issues.
Or perhaps it was another trick of my brain, matching what I see retrospectively to what I recorded decades ago in real time, like a strange form of déjà vu.
Houses and their primitive yet effective aqueduct – a canal system that follows the mountainside in Barhal on a gentler slope compared to the river, letting diverted water traverse the mountain so the villagers can take turns in watering their trees and plants.
But here I was, filled with a kind of relief that is similar to when one discovers that they were not wrong. Smells, colors, shapes, sounds. Even the footprints the bears left behind from their frequent visits to the orchards were there the way I remembered them.
Fresh bear footprints. There are three different footsteps of bears in this photo most likely from three distinct events that took place within a day or two. This is three minutes from our house, so they are quite ‘around’ all the time.
Yes. Everything was the way it was. Except one thing. I had gotten bigger in size, literally, and the proportions I recalled were off by a factor of two or three. A sensation that peaked when I walked into our old house.
Catellar
The day after my arrival, I went to see my uncle. Who is now 93 years old and whom I hadn’t seen in over 25 years. After an entire life outside of Barhal, he was back in his birthplace.
My uncle next to our house.
One day in 1963 this man walks over the mountains for three days to get to the city of Artvin, makes his way to Istanbul from there, and finds a job at a place in Emirgan that sold Turkish milk pudding (‘muhallebi’). He is one of the first people in Barhal who does that: leaving for good to build something outside. Soon after he brings my father, who is a few years younger than him. As a teenager, my father lives with my uncle in the same basement of the bakery while attending high school until about 1970. Their story gets brigther after that as they manage to put together a civil engineering company that becomes so successful that during its most glorious days it employs 1,600 people, some of whom are also from Barhal. As their success enables them to serve as a springboard and a familiar environment for others who were looking for an opportunity to work outside, it also contributes to the great migration to bigger cities that slowly turns Barhal into a village of older people.
Many times I thought about the fact that I missed the opportunity to choose between staying in Barhal forever or leaving it by just one generation. My father had that opportunity and chose to leave, thus my path was set to be a city person. I considered myself unlucky for a long time. But I am old now. And much more thankful for everything in general. I know that I am lucky to have my own family, a career, and great colleagues whom I connect with at levels of intellectual struggle that I consider a luxury and privilege. I guess each one of us finds a way to cope with the difference between what we have become and what we could have been. My way of coping with not growing old by tending the animals and trees and plants of Barhal to finally and rightfully deserve a spot under the reflection of its ancient monastery is identical to what we tell ourselves in the lab when our papers that took years to write get desk-rejected from our favorite journals: we get what we get and we don’t get upset. I got this, and I’m not upset. But I still find it interesting to look back.
Currently, my uncle is the only regular occupant of our old family house in the neighborhood of Catellar, just minutes of walking distance from the old monastery. This house, like many others, was built by my stonemason grandfather. When I finally walked into the living room after all those years, I was surprised to see that it was much, much smaller than how I remembered it. I used to think this place was a palace:
Living room of our house.
It is difficult to give a true sense of its size from a photograph. But one can use the remote on the table or the regular-sized lamp on the ceiling for scale to have an idea. Low ceilings, narrow corridors, doors that require you to slightly bend down to pass through. A house that humbles you by force multiple times a day. Yet, six people spent most of their time in this room.
Doleys
My family has an even older house in Barhal located in a part of the valley called Doleys, whose location I marked here in this photo I took from Sahsev, another neighborhood in Barhal:
Doleys seen from Sahsev. Baliyet in the near distance.
Visiting Doleys and seeing our ancient family house once again with my own eyes, and perhaps most importantly, drinking once again from the famous spring water of Doleys, were at the top of my priorities for this trip. Doleys, along with the houses in it, is in the process of being taken over by nature since it has been decades since the last occupant of this settlement moved elsewhere. The old foot paths no longer exist.
Uncle leads the way to the house in Doleys.
But all the houses stand strong, including ours, that features the only curved staircase in the entire village.
The rotating staircase and a bundle of plants someone place on the door ages ago solely for artistic reasons.
But the passing of time was not as forgiving to the inside of the house. An outcome that is inevitable, but still a bit heartbreaking. In addition to the weather, and lack of heating during the winter that destroy these houses, I learned that the biggest culprits of their demise is an unexpected bunch: the mountain goats.
Goat activity.
In their never-ending search for salt to make up for the sodium they sorely lack in their natural diet of alpine plants, apperantly mountain goats often break into unused houses and start digging the ground that is soaked with salt from decades of cooking. It is kind of insane to think that they can do this much damage, and then proudly leave their signature right there in the form of droppings you can see on the left side of the photo above. I am very happy that they felt safe enough to continue using this home to chill once they were done with their criminal activities.
The Honey Pot
As we were about to leave the house in Doleys, I noticed upstairs a pot in which my family stored honey for generations. My uncle suggested that it could be over 150 years old. In which case it was something that was very likely held by my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father.
Given the state of the house, I could see that the end of the journey of this pot and its eventual submission to a state of higher entropy was likely quite near. But what could one do against the approach of a mere pot towards a fate that awaits all of us, apart from recognizing it and taking notes? So I recognized it, and took note. But then, in a rare moment of clarity, and with encouragement from my uncle and Jessika, I realized that it was possible for me to take it with me, bring it to our new home in Germany, and provide an extension to its peaceful retirement after at least 100 years of serving a purpose for a family. I gently held it. Its quite heavy weight surprised me. Maybe it was heavy thanks to poor pottery skills of someone in my family tree, or maybe it felt that way due to the burden it just assumed to represent something far greater than its physical form as a vessel carrying a family history.
The honey pot en route.
I am extremely proud to say that it is now in my living room, where it stands as the most valuable material thing I have in my posession.
The honey put at home, after a thorough clean up.
I don’t have children. Therefore I don’t have anyone to leave it to. But I will write a will to leave it to an alumnus of my group who is willing to have it, with the promise that they will try to pass it to the next generation in their family tree, or let it cross genetic boundaries once again as will happen in this case. I just wish for this modest and unassuming pot to continue its journey as an artifact of some forgotten history, a witness of the passing of time, and an ambassador of Doleys, one of many human settlements that existed and perished on this planet, and generously offered its children an unbeatable view:
View from Doleys.