I have always loved being on the road, walking on the road. Following a path, sometimes passing through a forest area, sometimes steep slopes and sometimes plateaus... Being in high places, watching the plains below from above has always given me a sense of happiness.

​

When I was a child, I used to walk the mountains with my father and younger brother. When my brother and I climbed to the summit of Bozdağ, we were still children. My father would prepare sticks for us from cornel or chestnut trees days in advance. In fact, he once had our sticks baked in the village oven so that they would be more durable. We would peel the barks of our chestnut sticks at certain intervals and make motifs. My mother would prepare food for us. She would usually soak rusks or boil potatoes. I would always wrap my food in a handkerchief like in the movies. I would hang it on the end of my stick. Of course, since walking on the road like that wasn’t very comfortable, after a while I had to put my food in my bag… In those years, I realized that the people living in Bozdağ had never climbed the summit, and that no one, except for a few shepherds or hunters, had gone to the places we walked. But everyone knew they were there. Years later I could understand why. Let’s call it people’s struggle for life… They called people like us “idle” in the village. We were educated men who had no work to do in the summer months. On the other hand, the mountains were not safe places for them. Maybe they were outside their safe areas. In fact, as a child, I even believed that walking in the mountains was a crime. In the following years, I went hiking without telling anyone. I was both afraid and respectful of the mountains. For many years, I didn’t have the courage to walk to places I didn’t know, I walked the same roads over and over again. The places I couldn’t go to were full of mystery and represented an endless adventure…

​

Later, I became a Lord of the Rings fan. I don’t know how many times I watched the movies one after another. I would think of those characters while walking. Sometimes I would be Gandalf, sometimes Frodo Baggins. I would draw maps with encrypted poems on paper. But those maps would have mountains. As if if you cracked the code and were in the right place at the right time, you would see a sign where the shadow of the mountain peak fell… In fact, one day I threw a fleece blanket over my back like a shawl, and scared an old woman while I was descending the mountain with a staff in my hand. The woman shouted “unlucky” at me. I had a hard time until I told her whose son I was and introduced myself. I didn’t like using new Swiss army knives or modern accessories. I didn’t carry instant soup bags or three-in-ones in my bag. I liked using old-fashioned pots and pans like Frodo ate. The food on the mountain had to be worthy of the mountain. For example, I didn’t like eating rusks at home, but I would eat them on the mountain. I never drank spicy tea at home, but that tea was drunk in the mountains. Fruits that I never liked to eat tasted even better in the mountains. I would smoke my pipe after dinner, like Gandalf. Later, these characters began to seem meaningless to me. Gandalf hadn’t walked our mountains! Efeler and Zeybekler had roamed these mountains. But they didn’t seem to have a fantastic side either… On the other hand, I was trying to get to know the Zeybek culture. But there seemed to be a problem. For some, Efe was a “brave” and “manly” savior, for others, a “tyrant”. For some, he had always been in the mountains, for some, for a certain period of time. Some said it was the steppes of Central Asia, while others took his past back to Ancient Greece. Some sought its origins in the Aydınoğlu period. Efeler began with the Ottoman occupation of Birgi, and ended with Atatürk’s emergence on the stage of history and the republic. I found myself walking in the mountains as a child of this land, like an Efe, but the more I read about the Efe, the more confused I became. Then I didn't read for a long time... I postponed the problem I encountered and returned to my happy life. After all, I was a sports scientist, not a historian! I continued to walk in the mountains at every opportunity.

​

When I was a little boy, there was a spring that my father took my brother and me to. Its name was Kapaklı Pınar. Kapaklı Pınar; it was a water flowing from under a huge rock. It had a small natural basin made of rock right under where the water came out. And a lid on it. When you lifted the lid, the water would flow, when you closed it, it would stop. But it had deteriorated a little. Because when we were little, someone or someone else searching for treasure had damaged the spring. As far as I remember, its lid was gone and its water had decreased. After a long time, this spring became a source of trouble for me. I wanted to see the spring again, but I couldn’t remember where it was. My father was gone now either… There were a few people who knew where the spring was, but they had also grown old. If I found the spring, maybe I could fix it and do something if the water wasn’t flowing. I could even make a new lid for the spring with a slate stone I could find nearby. One day, I searched for the spring until it got dark, but I couldn’t find it. In the following days, I got lost again and again while searching. One day when I was lost, I went down to the garden of a house while going down to the village. When I passed that garden and went down to the road, a very old woman who I noticed was watching me from the window asked me “where I came from”. I told her I was looking for the covered spring. The woman said that water is called “efe water”. She described its location once more, but she used such a different language that it was impossible for me to find it. However, I could understand that I was looking for the spring in the wrong direction. I asked a shepherd friend of mine for help in this regard. My friend and I found the spring the next day. But the spring had deteriorated even more. My friend told me that day that people were looking for efe burials in the area and that they were constantly digging such fountains. Even the summit of a huge mountain was being dug up constantly. The graves of the saints were being destroyed. Ancient graves like the Forty, the Nine, the Seven, the Five and the Three… Then we talked about the paths. She showed me some pruning marks. Prunings that had been done years ago while riding a horse in a tahra. Those pruning marks were like evidence that that road was a real road. The tare marks on those trees were about five meters above the ground. They were obviously made years ago. They were taken on horseback in one go, to keep the path open. Then we went to the places where I got lost. I understood why I got lost. The paths that I had taken as the continuation of the paths had been opened by pigs. The real paths were closed. Because there were no more people in the mountains. There were no more horses, no more mules… My friend and I talked about shepherds. He told me how the animal herds in the mountains had shrunk over the years and then disappeared. He mentioned that he could no longer shepherd in the mountains and had to disperse his herd. The pine trees planted in the mountains had almost brought animal husbandry to an end. This situation had serious effects on the plains as well. Animal husbandry had now been reduced to the plains. While the free food and water in the mountains stopped, shepherds were migrating to the plains to engage in animal husbandry and struggling with serious costs. The culture of the mountains was in a constant state of change and transformation. I would always listen to my uncle and cousin about the problems of the farmers. They would sell the world's best potatoes for three cents every year. But my shepherd friend was talking about the goats and sheep on the mountain that day. Then we talked about the Efe. Maybe we told each other false things. But what we talked about was very exciting, fantastic. The idea that the Efe and Zeybeks might have used those roads made the roads we walked more meaningful to me.

​

Then I walked at every opportunity. Now I had quite a few Efeler in mind. Which paths did they use? Which mountain passes? Where did they hide? Then I talked to a few historians. I learned that Efe and Zeibeks used all these mountains. There was no hole in these mountains that Zeibeks did not enter and exit. In fact, I learned that the greatest success of Zeibek groups was their harmony with nature. In addition to knowing this geography very well, they survived thanks to their very good knowledge of the plants and animals on the mountains. What is eaten in which period? What is drunk? Where are the water sources? When does it flow? In which regions is wildlife more dense? Where is hunting done? How is the meat of which animal preserved? They had smelled the air. They had followed the cycles of the moon. For example, they had avoided raids and ambushes in full moon weather. They had preferred rainy weather so that they could lose their tracks more easily. I learned that when they were cold, they would warm up by wrapping their naked bodies in the warm skin of a freshly cut animal. This was a method I saw in Bear Grylls documentaries that I watched breathlessly. I learned that they listened to birds, for example. If they could not hear the birds they were used to hearing from a stream bed they knew very well, there was an ambush in that area or someone had recently passed through there. The wildlife around them was their friend. If there were no pigs in that bed, there was a problem. Dog barking was important to them. Because dogs barked differently to humans and animals. They had become masters of imitating wild animal sounds to communicate with each other and had developed certain passwords. I learned that they used spider webs on bleeding wounds, for example, to stop the bleeding. They made balsam by crushing worms and mixing them with olive oil. The Zeybeks kept the “otacı” culture alive in the mountains. They used medicines made from tree roots and the ash of wood fires. From the Aksedef plant to thyme, St. John’s wort, all the blessings of nature… The paths they walked on were real. They knew both the main route and the paths or yolaks well. These roads were ancient roads. I wondered how many of them were still intact? How many had been preserved? How could those roads be found? All the pieces were starting to fall into place. It had been years since I had the idea of creating a cultural route that would interact with the provinces of Manisa, Izmir and Aydin, covering the Bozdag and Aydin mountains, but the theme on which the route would be built had come to mind at that moment.

 

This route should have been the “Efeler Yolu”!