Eoin O Súilleabháin,  Limerick, Ireland

Our word “cherry” comes from the Ancient Roman name Cerasus.  This is what the Romans called Giresun, the capital city of Giresun Province in the northeast of Turkey on the Black Sea.  Giresun was a major exporter of cherries to the Roman Empire as early as 70BC,  and today it carries on that tradition as the producer of the world’s finest hazelnuts.

 The symbol of the municipality of Giresun shows the mountains in the background, two hazelnuts, the Byzantine Castle that crowns the cliff on of the old part of the city, a cherry and two fish.

 On the first morning of our meeting, we were greeted by eight of Atilla Unat’s English students from the secondary school where he teaches.  Atilla had invited them there to practise their English on us, so we spent the morning answering questions like, ‘What are your hobbies?’, ‘Have you got any brothers and sisters?’, and ‘How old are you?’.

We were waiting for the Greek delegation who were traveling from another town that morning, so the rest of us went for a walk to a nearby park perched up over the port with a beautiful view of the blue Black Sea and the green mountains with the town nestled in beneath them.

After my first of uncountable cups of Turkish tea, we headed back to the hotel for our introductions session.  There in our conference room a group of women from the parents’ organisation of the school were totally engrossed in embroidering very detailed flowers on handkerchiefs.  They worked throughout the whole session, so that at the end we were all presented with the first of many gifts that I stuffed into my case to take home with me.

The tone of the session was very informal, relaxed and welcoming.  A person from each group got up and very briefly outlined where they came from and how delighted they were to be part of the BRIDGE Project.

Then we all headed out and piled into a couple of vans to take us to an undisclosed location for our lunch.  Little did we know where we were headed for – truly one of the best kept secrets of the Giresun region.

We headed out from the town out a main road alongside a river, and very soon took a right over a small bridge onto a secondary road that was very worn and full of potholes.  The drivers had to zig-zag their way along this road that was heading straight up into the sheer green mountains we had been admiring from a distance that morning.  Up we went, snaking our way along the worn and bumpy road, in awe at the beauty of hills and valleys that opened up around every bend, the hillsides were all just bursting to life after the winter, and the bright green leaves and grass shone blindingly in the noon-time sun.

After a quick stop by a little bridge of a stream in a ravine, we made the final ascent to our destination.  We stopped outside a little rectangular wooden cabin, perched on the side of a ravine overlooking the waterfall of mountain river.  This was a restaurant, with a beautiful little walkway down to the water, crossing a little bridge and leading us up stream to another little falls.  There were hammocks hanging randomly between tree trunks, wooden benches by the river, a little pond filled with fish, and a barbecue being prepared for the lunch that was to follow.  After a little exploring we were ushered into the cabin where we all sat at one long table and the food arrived, and it didn’t stop arriving!  We had plate after plate of fresh fish and chicken, bowls of crisp salad and chunks of crusty white bread.  It was the first time that I thought of how Mediterranean the whole feel of the place was: from the sunlit seaside, to the fresh mountains, to the simple delicate cuisine.

That night we all met up at a restaurant on the seafront for our evening meal.  There we were joined by teachers and the headmaster from the school in Giresun, the Ataturk Lisesi Parents Association School, and also by the head of education in the Giresun region.  There were two students from the school singing some songs throughout the dinner, and in the end calls from Atilla for me to sing a song got the better of me, and I jumped up to sing a version of Van Morrisson’s Crazy Love with all of us singing along to the two-word chorus in Turkish that Atila had just taught me.

The following day we went to the Ataturk Lisesi Parents Association School.  The sun was blazing through the crisp spring morning and as we approached the school we could see that all the kids were out in the school yard.  We were seated facing the four story school block with the sun on our backs when traditional Turkish music came blasting out of an invisible sound system.  Then came a whole troupe of about 30 girls doing a type of Turkish Riverdance.  Please see the Youtube clip to get a real idea of what a luxurious spectacle this actually was.  The joy and confidence that these girls had was inspiring, so inspiring that two of the onlooking boys came running over and started to join them.  Then the dance turned from a very formal type of line dance into a free-for-all type of improvisation that could easily have happened in any night-club. 

We were taken for a tour of the school then, and ended up in the headmaster’s office for a round of tea.  Then we all headed off to the local main hazelnut production factory.  This factory is a semi-state industry, which like our own semi-states, is under huge pressure from the Global Neo-liberal agenda of inevitable privatisation in the face of the capitalist race to the bottom.

Finally, we had our last session together over rounds of an amazing Turkish dish that consisted of a two foot long pita bread with minced meat inside, with a side dish of butter that you rub over it: astonishingly delicious!

Overall, the main thing that this teacher from Ireland took from his experience as a guest in Giresun, is how amazingly European the place is. The Black Sea has always been connected to the Mediterranean, and since ancient times the people in Giresun have traded and traveled all over Europe.  The Ottoman Empire at its height stretched almost all the way to Vienna.  And Turkey has been an associate member of the EU since 1963 and was the first after the founding ten to be a member of the Council of Europe in 1949, and formal negotiations began in 2005 for its accession.  Its population of nearly 72 million will have a hugely positive effect on the EU.

The value of this Grundvig BRIDGE project is very difficult to quantify.  The way to really educate is to meet the ‘other’.  That other can take the form of the teacher/student, and even of the ‘unknown’. The fullest expression of experiencing the other is to travel and to become immersed in it.  And that is exactly what BRIDGE allows these teachers, from all over Europe, the opportunity to do.  This can only create a fuller and more meaningful European Integration in the context of what has been described as the largest ever peace movement of all time – The European Union.