(from an article by Sevan Nisanyan published in TUSIAD Outlook magazine, September 2000)

It is of course very good to be travelling and discovering all sorts of fabulous out-of-the way places, but if you have to live in one then Sirince is your cup. This is an old village in the hills of Ephesus. It is full of pretty wattle-and-daub houses which rise in tiers on the side of a hill. They overlook a basin of vineyards and peach gardens where - miraculously - no one has yet thought of plonking down a toplu konut sitesi (a bally housing estate, in Turkish). You get there by a narrow country road which winds along olive groves and old garden walls, past fields overflowing with the scarlet poppy. Then you go over a saddle of the hill, and you know this must be IT. The place that you have dreamed about all your life. The perfect village.

It is hard to tell what it is that makes this village so satisfyingly right. Is it the unerring Greek sense (for Sirince used to be a Greek settlement) of where to put a village and how to draw its contours? It could simply be that there is just about no village left in Aegean Turkey where brick-and-cement hovels have not yet drowned out all sense of grace or proportion. Sirince is one of them. There may be two or three others. None of them is nearly as good.

It is not a touristy place yet. The women, it is true, have taken to selling gewgaws on the village square, and the old farrier's shop was recently turned - sadly - into a wine pub. But cafe talk still revolves around winestock and figs, and in the village lanes you are more likely to be run down by a laden donkey than a motorcar. The nights are silent. There are some nightingales which sing right through early summer nights, and occasionally the dogs get excited about a passing fox. A rumble or a screech heard after dinner time causes comment. For a night about town, the boys have to commute all the way to Selçuk, the big town 8 kilometers down the road.

The Romans were here, too. They built several underground burial chambers of gigantic stone blocks which the rascals at the Antiquities Department have not yet even heard about. They also carved some basins at the spring which still supplies the village tap and built an aqueduct to carry the water down to Ephesus. Later, someone put a chapel in a cave whose milky trickle of lime-water was sought after by nursing mothers who worried about their output of milk. It was said to have been blessed by Virgin Mary herself when she lived down the road in Ephesus.

Not far from the village in Mill Valley is the Byzantine monastery. The owner of this ruin was so fed up with the nightly forays of treasure-seekers that he felt he had to wall up the crypt. And further up that road lies a Roman quarry in which Sherif the Shepherd lives alone with his three hundred goats. Once a year, on the first day of the Feast of Sacrifice, he puts on a clean shirt and a pair of shoes and comes down to the village to visit his sister. The lesson? Someone's idyllic village is someone else's great metropolis. Relativity, in other words.