Porcelain Moon and Pomegranates

The book I read in the category Travel for the 2023 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE is Porcelain Moon and Pomegranates: A Woman’s Trek Through Turkey by Üstün Bilgin-Reinart, 2007.

Bilgin-Reinart was born in Ankara, Turkey but lived most of her adult life in Canada, where she worked as a television journalist. After she moved back to Turkey, she spent time traveling around the country to investigate various issues involving social life, politics and history. This book is a compilation of her travels, interspersed with memories of her upbringing and family and her personal view of life in Turkey.

But this is not any kind of travel guide; it is her focus on various issues relevant to Turkey and its history, with descriptions of the areas she travelled to.

These issues include:

• Archeological remains; mother goddess; ancient religion
• Prostitutes & brothels
• Honor murders
• Kurds in the southeast
• Aspects of gold mining & its effect on the environment

I particularly liked the chapter, "Matar Kubileya, Mountain Mother," in which she writes about the evidence of “continued worship of a great goddess in Anatolia long after the emergence of powerful male gods in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.” To investigate this, she interviews a retired professor who is an amateur expert on archaeology and mythology and who wrote a book, “Anatolia, Land of the Mother Goddess.” In addition, she travels to Çatalhöyük, an archaeological site of a Neolithic city-settlement in southern Anatolia [for information about this site, see my post of September 26, 2022, Four Lost Cities].

Her interest in this topic resonates with me:

            “Here I will say that I am neither a New Age spiritualist nor a follower of Wicca nor a goddess worshipper. I am simply a female researcher is passionate about Anatolia’s human past and who is fascinated with the likelihood that completely different societies than the ones we now take for granted once existed on this soil. On the trail of the Anatolian goddess, I have come to understand something striking, frustrating, and exciting about prehistoric archaeology: there are so many gaps in research and so little proof about how prehistoric peoples viewed the universe, that ultimately we are left with one archaeologist’s speculation pitted against another’s.”

Although I found every chapter to be extremely interesting, another one I can highlight is “Sacred Women,” in which Bilgin-Reinart visits and interviews prostitutes in Ankara’s municipally regulated brothels. Their lives are completely unknown to me, and their stories are never told. She not only explains the concept of municipally regulated brothels, but she describes these women’s work and lives with sensitivity and compassion.

I enjoyed reading this book very much, for the information, for the descriptive – sometimes lyrical – language, and for the fascinating character of Üstün Bilgin-Reinart herself.