A couple of years ago a Turkish friend showed me a story in one of the papers about a minor but irritating problem concerning two members of Nato which, luckily, appears to have been sorted out.

It seems that if a group of Turkish naval officers was invited aboard a Greek vessel they would, of course, be offered coffee. ‘Yes, we would love some Turkish coffee’, they would say. ‘Unfortunately, we only have Greek coffee’, would come the rejoinder.  And, of course, the reverse would follow the same pattern: Greek officers invited on Turkish vessel; offer of coffee; ‘love some Greek coffee’ blah blah blah.

Of course  ‘Turkish’ coffee, ‘Greek’ coffee, ‘Serb’ coffee, ‘Croat’ coffee and, for all I knew, all coffee in that part of the world, involves exactly the same procedure:  you shove X amount of ground coffee in a container, add sugar if wanted, bring it to the boil two or three times, serve, drink till you reach the grounds, stop drinking.

Eventually it was agreed - at a very high level - that the conversation would go as follows, whoever were the hosts.

Hosts        ‘Coffee?’

Guests       ‘Yes, please’.

We come to southern Turkey most years (click here for photos) and have got in the habit of taking a day trip to the most easterly part of Greece, an island which the Turks call Meis and the Greeks Kastellorizo, less than half an hour from the Turkish coast.   We normally book through a local firm, paying a fixed price which covers being picked up from our hotel, driven the 27 km east along the coast to Kaş, the round trip to the island, then back home again.

This last time I sat in front next to the driver and had quite a decent chat with him, in Turkish, bemoaning the fact that new housing was creeping up the hills, that loud western pop music was blasting out from too many cafes, that young Turkish kids weren’t interested in their own music, two old fogeys just nattering on.  At one point he retuned the radio, bringing up a Greek lament from over the way. I commented that Greek and Turkish music are not all that different, and the driver agreed.  I went on to say that Greek and Turkish food are not that different. Again he agreed, adding that Greek and Turkish people are not all that different, either..

In fact, the argument I put forward when Jane, quite some time ago, suggested that we should go to Turkey on holiday was just that. Why bother? Similar climate? Check. Similar food? Check. Similar fauna, flora, ancient ruins, chances of being caught in an earthquake? Check, check check.  Similar languages?  NO NO NO!   I’d spent a couple of years at evening classes, getting my head round Greek. Why should I go to a country where I knew nothing of the language?

But Jane kept telling me of her delight in spending a few weeks in Turkey back in the early 70s, as part of an overland trip to India. So, one year, when I was invited in the September to a conference on the Black Sea, in Bulgaria, I promised that we would take a boat across to Istanbul afterwards and take it from there.  As it happened, the conference fell through, but - so as not to disappoint Jane - I booked a holiday which included a week in the family hotel in southern Turkey which has become our second home:  ikinci evimiz.

As I wrote earlier, I liked Turkey enough on that first visit to set about learning the language on subsequent visits (and, later, to increase my knowledge of the language by going to evening classes in London). So, do I prefer it to Greece?  That, to me, is a question that makes no sense.  Yes, the two countries have much in common; and yes, they are distinctively different.

It is the former that gets me mad when I come across pseudo differences like the Turkish/Greek coffee business.  And it doesn’t take much digging to find other little niggly prejudices popping up. Now, one of the minor joys of staying on the eastern or southern parts of the Mediterranean is sitting in a cafe, with a beer if that’s allowed, eating some kind of meaty thing wrapped in some kind of bready thing (whether you call it a kebab, souvlaki, pide, brochette or whatever). And I’ve particularly enjoyed the Greek ‘souvlaki’ version, especially with lamb in some spicy sauce, which I first had in Kos with Jane back in the late 70s, and have had in many other parts of Greece, including Athens.

But in Rhodes a couple of years ago we sat down in a restaurant and discovered that, although they had pork or chicken souvlaki, there was no lamb version on the menu. Same next door, and next door to that. Finally I asked why they don’t have lamb souvlaki. ‘We don’t have that in Greece’, I was told.  When I persisted, the owner told me, in an undertone, jerking his thumb towards Turkey just a few kilometres away, that they didn’t like the lamb version, because that was what they ate ‘over there’.

I don’t know, maybe these attitudes reflect a residual resentment of the fact that, less than a century ago, much of ‘over there’ was Greek. In fact Kalkan, where we stay most years, was a little Greek fishing and trading village called Kalamaki until (as part of the exchange of populations following WW1) the inhabitants were resettled en masse in a new town not far from Athens, which they promptly named ‘Kalamaki’.  (For an intriguing account of relationships in this area between Turkish and Greek speakers, read Louis de Bernière’s epic novel Birds Without Wings, set in what is now a ghost town called Kayaköy, not far from the bustling market town of Fethiye).

Kalkan still has a number of beautiful old Greek houses, mostly in the ‘Old Town’, where one can have an impression of what life was like way back then.   Kastellorizo itself is a riot of freshly painted houses, some - I was told - bought up and restored by Aussie-Greeks, descendants of those who fled the island as a result of devastating bombing attacks during the Second World War.

As we approached Kastellorizo I was trying to block out Turkish for a while, ready to replace it with some of the Greek I’d been listening to on my I-Pod for the previous day or so, helped out by a rapid check in my phrasebook for missing words.  There was no way I was going to be able to converse with people the way I had with the ‘minibus şoförü’, but, as we reached our favourite harbour-side restaurant I was able to greet the owner and come out with ‘I would like to book a table for two for one o’clock’ and ask if they had a speciality of the Dodecanese, the tiny shrimps known as ‘garidakia’, which are swiftly flash-fried and eaten whole. (They did, indeed, and a portion of these each, with a bowl of soup made from the head of a freshly caught kingfish, and a small bottle of retsina made a satisfying - and very Greek - lunch).

Bits more Greek bubbled out of me during the day, though I had to switch to English when the owner of a cafe - whose team was due to play Arsenal later on - asked me which team I supported. (I quickly invented one, since not to have a team is considered somewhat unmanly).

Back in Turkey, while we were waiting for our passports to come back from the border police to the boat office, I switched back to Turkish, to ask if there was maybe a cheaper way to organise the trip. The manager, however, claimed that he failed to understand me, switching abruptly to English and saying he had a problem with my quote ‘Broken Turkish’ unquote!   What!  Is one day in Greece enough to undo all those months of hard work?     Or could it be that, somehow, the Greek and Turkish languages had been fighting it out in my cortex with the result that ‘this brain ain’t big enough for the both of us’.

Phew!  By that evening, anyway, I’d stopped thinking in or about Greek, and things were more or less back to normal, with people in Kalkan complimenting me on the way I spoke their language. Broken Turkish, indeed!

(For photos of Castellorizo, including a couple of Jane and me, click on or paste in the following link, which takes you to the Facebook page of a young American woman - with the seriously cool name of Judi Desire - whom we met on the boat over.)

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150328396647899.370287.611007898&l=c711180255&type=1