We changed at a swimming club where some men were sunning themselves. In the water I challenged him to a race. He won it easily and splashed water at me as I struggled in his wake. The previous day he had looked like a bull; but now, swimming, his bulk making the water foam at his arms, he had the movement of a mature sea monster, with hairy shoulders and a thick neck, and he surfaced roaring as his vast head dripped. The champion swimmers – he claimed to be one – all came, he said, from Adana, his birthplace in South Anatolia.

'I love my country,' he said, meaning Anatolia. 'I love it. Taurus Mountains. Plains. Old villages. Cotton. Eagles. Oranges. The best horses – very long horses.' He put his hand on his heart: 'I love.'

We talked about writers. He loved Chekhov; Whitman was a good man; Poe was also great. Melville was good: every year Yashar read Moby Dick, and Don Quixote, 'and Homerus'. We were pacing up and down in the hot sun on the beach front, and Yashar cast a giant shadow over me that eliminated any danger of my getting sunburned. He didn't like Joyce, he said. 'Ulysses - too simple. Joyce is a very simple man, not like Faulkner. Listen. I am interested in form. New form. I hate traditional form. Novelist who use traditional form is' – he fumbled for a word – 'is dirt.'

'I don't speak English,' he said after a moment. 'Kurdish I speak, and Turkish, and gypsy language. But I don't speak barbarian languages.'

'Barbarian languages?'

'English! German! Ya! French! All the barbarian – ' As he spoke, there was a shout. One of the men sunning himself in a beach chair called Yashar over and showed him an item in a newspaper.

Returning, he said, 'Pablo Neruda is dead.'

Yashar insisted on stopping at the fishing village on the way back. About fifteen men sat outside a cafe. Seeing Yashar, they leaped to their feet and Yashar greeted each one with a bear hug. One was a man of eighty; he wore a ragged shirt and his trousers were tied with a piece of rope. He was deeply tanned, barefoot, and toothless. Yashar said he had no home. The man slept in his caique every night, whatever the weather, and he had done so for forty years. 'So he has his caique and sleeps in it too.' These men, and one we met later on the steep path (Yashar kissed him carefully on each cheek before introducing him to me), obviously looked upon Yashar as a celebrity and regarded him with some awe.

'These my friends,' said Yashar. 'I hate writers; I love fishermen.' But there was a distance. Yashar had attempted to overcome it with clowning intimacy, yet the distance remained. In the atmosphere of the cafe one would never take Yashar – twice as big as any of the others and dressed like a golf pro – for a fisherman; neither would one take him for a writer on the prowl. There, he looked like a local character, part of the scenery and yet in contrast to it.

It seemed to me that his restless generosity led him into contradictions. My conclusion did not make my understanding any easier. Over lunch of fried red mullet and white wine Yashar talked about prison, Turkey, his books, his plans. He had been to jail; Thilda had served an even longer jail sentence; their daughter-in-law was in jail at the moment. This girl's crime, according to Thilda, was that she had been found making soup in the house of a man who had once been wanted for questioning in connection with a political offence. It was no good expressing disbelief at the muddled story. Turkey, the Turks say, is not like other places, though, after describing in the dour Turkish way the most incredible horrors of torture and cruelty, they invite you to come and spend a year there, assuring you the whole time that you'll love the place.

Yashar's own characteristics were even stranger. A Kurd, he is devoted to Turkey and will not hear of secession; he is an ardent supporter of both the Soviet government and Solzhenitsyn, which is something like rooting for the devil as well as Daniel Webster; he is a Muslim Marxist, his wife is a Jew, and the only foreign country he likes better than Russia is Israel, 'my garden'. With the physique of a bull and the gentleness of a child, he maintains in the same breath that Yoknapatawpha County has an eternal glory and that the Kremlin's commissars are visionary archangels. His convictions defy reason, and at times they are as weirdly unexpected as the blond hair and freckles you see in Asia Minor. But Yashar's complexity is the Turkish character on a large scale.

I told Moles worth this at our farewell lunch. He was sceptical. 'I'm sure he's a marvellous chap,' he said. 'But you want to be careful with the Turks. They were neutral during the war, you know, and if they'd had any backbone at all they would have been on our side.'

'T beg you to look at this scroll and look at me,' said JL the antique dealer in Istanbul's Covered Bazaar. He flapped the decaying silk scroll at his ears. 'You say the scroll is stained and dirty! Yes! It is stained and dirty! I am forty-two years old and bald on my head and many wrinkles. This scroll is not forty-two years old – it is two hundred years old, and you won't buy it because you say it is stained! What do you expect? Brand shiny new one? You are cheating me!'

He rolled it up and stuck it under my arm, and stepping behind the counter he sighed. 'Okay, cheat me. It is early in the morning. Take it for four hundred liras.'

'Olmaz,' I said, and handed it back. I had expressed only a polite curiosity in the scroll, but he had taken this for canny interest, and each time I tried to walk away he reduced his price by half, believing my lack of enthusiasm to be a wily bargaining ploy.

Finally I broke away. I had overslept. I was hungry, and I had provisions to buy for my trip on the Lake Van Express, which had a reputation for running out of food and arriving at the Iranian border as much as ten days late. Food was on my mind for another reason. I had intended to sample some dishes mentioned in Nagel. The names tempted me, and, as I would be leaving on the afternoon train, this was my last chance to try them. I had drawn up a menu for myself. This included 'The Imam Fainted' (Imam Bayildi, a kind of ratatouille), 'Vizier's Finger' (Vezir Parmagi), 'His Majesty Liked It' (Hunkar Begendi), and two irresistible ones, 'Lady's Thigh' (Kadin Badu) and 'Lady's Navel' (Kadin Bobegi).

There wasn't enough time for me to try more than the last two. I stopped at a coffee shop on my way to the ferry and wondered if the Turks' taste in anatomy was revealed in their choice of names: the thigh was meaty, the navel sweet. At twenty cents each they were a good deal cheaper and probably a lot safer than their namesakes arrayed after midnight in the alleys off Istiklal Caddesi. To the braying of saxophones in the dimly lit taverns, these alley cats pluck at your sleeve as you pick your way along the steep cobbled footpath. But I was resolute. I never got closer to a lady's thigh in Istanbul than the pastry with the euphemistic name. Besides, I had been warned that most of the alley cats were transvestites who, during the day, worked as crew members on the Bosporus ferries.

I believed that when the epicene voice of a youth in a sailor suit, addressing me sweetly as Effendi, urged me to hurry as I boarded the ferry for my last trip to Haydarpasa. I found the upper deck and sorted out my provisions: I had cans of tuna fish, beans and stuffed grape leaves, several cucumbers and a lump of white goat's cheese, as well as crackers, pretzels, and three bottles of wine – one bottle for each day to Lake Van. I also took with me three cartons of whipped yogurt, which they call ayran, said to be the traditional drink of Turkish shepherds.