A Child's Geography: Explore the Holy Land
6
Tales of flying carpets are merely the stuff of fantasy, but our
carpet is as real as the Garden of Eden once was. We’d find
such a carpet in Turkey…but where exactly are we? Hold a
globe in your hand and spin till you find where God has
intersected the Mediterranean Sea, and the continents of
Europe and Asia; there you will pinpoint Turkey. Now that
you’ve landed, let’s make our way to the crowded Turkish
Grand Bazaar in the city of Istanbul. (Can you locate
Istanbul in the northwest corner?) A bazaar is the Persian
word for market, and it is here in the Grand Bazaar of
Istanbul that we would find our ornate Turkish carpet called
a kilim (KEE-lim). Here, in alleys so narrow one can hardly
squeeze through, stringing along more than 65 streets,
merchants from over 4,000 shops shout out to passing
shoppers trying to sell their colorful wares. Some
shopkeepers of the Grand Bazaar grab our arms, tugging us
into their stalls, while others tickle our ear with whispered
prices especially negotiated for us. In one shop selling
carpets, I imagine our fingers reaching out to feel the dark
hues and naturally dyed colors. Perhaps the shopkeeper,
Ahmet, may roll the kilim out for us, chuckling, “Evet, evet,”
(Yes, yes in Turkish) teasing us that our carpet may float
away, sweeping us up over the Grand Bazaar and all of the
city of Istanbul. Imagine: a dip and a dive, a launch and an
upward lunge, and here we would be, on our own kilim,
looking down at the country of Turkey below us!
With your eye on your globe and Turkey far below, what image can you form out of the shapes you
see? I imagine a strange creature with the Sea of Marmara as an eye. Can you pinpoint where
Istanbul and the Grand Bazaar might be?
Turkey covers an area of 301,400 square miles [780,626 square kilometers] which is about the size of
the states of Texas and Virginia combined. While we may have an easy overview of the entire
country from our carpet, Turkey actually spans about 1000 miles [1, 609 km] from end to end. We’d
have to start driving before the sun rose and drive long after sunset, to cross the entire country.
From your carpet perch, you would surely have noticed the four great bodies of water bordering
Turkey: the Mediterranean Sea, the Aegean Sea, the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. What
makes these bodies of water seas and not oceans or lakes? A sea is a stretching expanse of salty
water that is usually a reaching arm of ocean, butting into a continent of land. If you look carefully,
you’ll find that the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, is really just an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that
God has allowed to reach into the lands of Africa, Europe and Asia. Out of the Mediterranean Sea
stretches another arm, the Aegean Sea…and out of the Aegean Sea extends the arm of the Sea of
Marmara….which reaches out even further as the Black Sea. This arm of seas from the Atlantic
Ocean is a long-reaching arm indeed! (Our travels will lead us to seas that are not connected to
oceans at all, but are entirely surrounded by land, called land-locked seas. Such a body of water is
nearly always a body of salty water. [An exception is the Sea of Galilee.] A lake, on the other hand, is
a large body of usually fresh water surrounded by land.)