Trabzon: Things To Do In A Provincial Seaside Town

On the way from Istanbul to Georgia, I needed to find somewhere to work for a few days. I looked at a map, and picked Trabzon at random

Why Trabzon?

I had slightly unrealistic plans for the part of my trip between Istanbul and Georgia. Originally, I’d hoped to take a leisurely route along Turkey’s Black Sea coast - I had sunny visions of drifting by dolmuş from one coastal town to the next. But in reality, I had less than a week to spare. And travelling through Turkey is time-consuming because Turkey, it transpires, is huge.

Also,  had to spend a couple of days doing work on my laptop. So I had to make a compromise. As a kind of interim stop on the way to my three-day tour in Georgia, I decided to find a random town where there wasn’t much to do. Somewhere I wouldn’t feel too frustrated being sat indoors.

So I decided to catch a domestic flight from Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen Airport to a coastal town called Trabzon.

A Black Sea Town

Trabzon is located a hundred miles or so from the Georgian border. With a population of 763,000, it’s what I’d call a big small town. Outside Turkey, it’s most famous for its Süper Lig football team, Trabzonspor. As we flew over, I spotted the team’s football ground just outside of town. Football definitely seems to be popular here; there was a string of pitches beneath the balcony of my Airbnb where teams played every night.

It definitely has something of a reputation in Turkey, although I can’t figure out exactly what it is: I suppose it’s one of those nuanced, regional things. When I told a Turkish guy in a Yerevan bar that I’d stayed in Trabzon, he fell into a fit of hysterical giggles. I guess it was like when I got chatting to an Azeri sex worker at the bar of an Irish pub in Baku, and she told me how she’d been to Whitby in the north-east of England - you just don’t expect to hear such things.

Trabzon is no holiday destination in any typical seaside sense, due to the Black Sea Highway. This thundering, slightly terrifying four-lane road runs in a circle area the sea, Turkey, Georgia, Russia, the Ukraine and Romania. It’s no doubt a valuable piece of infrastructure, but it makes Trabzon’s shore incredibly hard to access. When I did cross the footbridge, and walked along the harbour, I found a few joggers, and some men working in the shipyard, but little else.

The tourists who do come Trabzon (mostly native Turks, as well as Arabs and some Russians) actually head out into the surrounding in Karadeniz (Turkish for Black Sea) region, where the scenery is lush, tropical and beautiful, and there’s plenty of hiking and camping to be done. Uzongöl Lake is a popular holiday destination, while the cliffside Sumela Monastery is a spectacular historical site (although it’s currently being renovated). 

© MUSTAFA ABID

Trabzon’s Hagia Sofia

Trabzon does have its own attractions to offer. There’s the Hagia Sophia. Much like the one in Istanbul, it’s a church-turned-mosque that also functioned as a provisional hospital and depot when the Russian military took control during World War One. (A cannon in the grounds hints at its military history.) While small and humble, this Byzantine building’s interior features some astonishing thirteenth-century frescos that have survived the years remarkably well - actually, far more so than the ones its Istanbul namesake.

I ate breakfast at the open-air restaurant in the Hagia Sophia’s grounds, where I ordered a local speciality called kuymak. This is an incredibly gooey, incredibly heavy dish made of melted cheese and cornmeal (harvested in the Karadeniz fields): think Turkish fondue, scooped up into long sinewy strands and deposited on bread. Delicious, yes, but not something you tuck into every morning. 

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The Market Quarter

Another morning, I wandered in the opposite direction, and found a fish market. It’s hardly any big surprise that a coastal town like Trabzon sells and consumes as much fish as it does; it’s best known for hamsi, an anchovy-like fish that is served in huge, deep-fried stacks in the local restaurants.

I then got promptly lost in a bazaar, as it seems you have to. Making my way through the alleyways of stalls selling fabrics, handbags, furniture, brooms, baskets and jewellery, I eventually doubled back on myself and ended up at a wooden building, and a huge fruit and veg market: hot, crowded, dark and rather smelly. 

You can barely walk a few paces with passing a teahouse where, without fail, there would be groups of men sat on tiny stools sipping çay. Çay is everywhere in Trabzon: in the street, in shops, even in the concourse of the town’s bus station. When I went into an electronics store to buy a plug adaptor, the guy sold me one, and then invited me into his office, and rang an associate who came in with two fresh glasses. As he went through his paperwork behind his desk, we sat in silence, sipping our drinks.

An evening in Meydan

On my penultimate evening in Trabzon, I heard a knock on my apartment door. It was my next-door neighbour, a German-Turkish man named Mustafa who was renting from the same Airbnb host, and was spending seven weeks travelling around Turkey. He invited me into town for dinner; on the busy dual carriageway outside we caught a dolmuş into Meydan, Trabzon’s town centre.

I hadn’t yet been into the town centre: it was far busier than I expected, buzzing with nocturnal life. Mustafa instructed me to walk more slowly, to the appropriate late-night tempo, and we drifted around the central square. We watched two buskers: one playing a stringed instrument called a kemençe, one marching about half-singing, half-reciting something into a mic. (Unfortunately all the pictures I took were really poor: the best is below.)

People would occasionally go up to the half-singer. Mustafa explained this was a type of traditional music in which people would give the performer bits of information, and he would spin them out into stories for the crowd’s amusement. I didn’t understand a word, but I loved watching him. The way he swaggered up and down the square, barking frantically into the mic, reminded me of a rapper. He knew how to work the crowd.

Mustafa was great: he spoke English, spoke Turkish, and had figured out where the best restaurants were. When I told him I wanted to try hamsi, he suggested Roka Balik, a fish restaurant in Medyan. Unfortunately hamsi weren’t yet in season (October to February), but there was another selection of similar fish called istavril that were crispy, greasy and delicious. We were also served gherkins, baked potatoes and a plate of crumbled dried cheese (another local speciality). I know it all looks a bit uninspiring in the picture below but they came together perfectly. This was regional Turkish food: unlike anything I’ve tried in London.

After dinner, we drifted around town, and took a seat at a teahouse: one glass of çay after another. We talked about our jobs, families, relationships; the conversation flowed as fluently as the crowds around us. It comes from the sort of immediate, contextless companionship you can only get when you’re out of your day-to-day life.

If it hadn’t been for that evening with Mustafa, I might have written off my time in Trabzon as a slightly pointless chapter in my trip: a stopover in a backwater town where nobody spoke English, where I had to walk 30 minutes to find a shop that sold beer, and where I had to spend most of my time in front of my laptop. Trabzon is a town I know I’ll never visit again. But that makes it special in its own particular way. MB

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