A little less than 20 years ago, we met a young man by the name of Oliver. Everybody called him “Ollie.” Ollie had come from a middle-class German family, actually a theatrical family. Unfortunately sometime in his late teens or early 20s he had fallen into bad company and, almost inevitably, into the grim world of drugs. We never asked about, so never learnt, the story of his progress through that world, nor did we learn why he had left his home country to come to Turkey. We did speculate though that it was a flight to freedom.Ollie settled in a quiet valley about 12 miles from our valley, there to live a simple life well away from bad influences. Yes, he drank a little, but only beer. Oh, I daresay that when the (then) occasional backpacker found his way to that remote valley, then Ollie may have enjoyed the odd exotic cigarette, but I’m sure that was all.
I stress here that Ollie was a lovely and gentle man, but he was not without fault. He was a lousy guitarist and a truly horrible singer. Now those faults may be unimportant in a person who is aware of them, but unfortunately our friend wasn’t. At the drop of a hat, he would “entertain” whatever company he was in with his limited repertoire of popular music. At a late night party that sort of thing is expected and harmless, but Ollie would perform at any time of the night or day. Frau and I still cringe at the opening chords of “Bridge over Troubled Waters” even from Messrs. Simon and Thingy.
Ollie possessed a unique talent in being able to smell a cooked meal or a crate of beer from many miles away and was able to turn up at precisely the right time to help us dispose of either or both. So it was that on many, many nights he would sigh deeply at, say 11 p.m., and announce that he would stay the night. We hardly minded that at all, but as we only have one bedroom, it did mean him sleeping on the sofa in the lounge. Again, a small inconvenience; however, I eventually vowed to build him a simple small shelter on our land behind the cottage. It was to be called “The Ollie House.”
I designed an A-framed simple structure with room for only two bunks and a built-in table. It would measure about 3 meters long by 2.5 meters wide at the base, the “A” having a 2.5-meter base and a height of a little less than 4 meters. Do you get the picture? Lovely it would be. I laid the concrete base in which I inset occasional short pieces of timber on which to nail the ground pieces. The whole structure was to be of 4x2 timbers and probably clad in that “Lambiri” tongue and grooved planking ubiquitous in Turkish bars and restaurants. No kitchen or toilet facilities, the hut was to be only 30 seconds’ walk from our cottage to which he would have free access.
I was too slow with the project. Before I even started on the superstructure, dear Oliver had a terrible accident on his motorcycle, and after a day or two in a coma, he died.
The concrete base of course remained, but I had lost the incentive to complete the project; we used it as another terrace, but not often.
Maybe a year after losing Ollie, a neighboring farmer offered to sell us a very old grain store. It was about 2 meters by 2.5 meters and a minimum of about 1-meter-high but raised itself another 30 centimeters halfway along its 2.5 meters. It had four storage compartments, each accessed from a trapdoor in the top of the box. It was built in cedar wood to last forever and was built to be demountable so that it could easily be transported from field to field or even farm to farm. The main structural elements were not nailed at the corners but were fixed by halved-joints. The ground-resting timbers were slightly sledge-shaped at the ends to allow dragging over short distances. It was a superb piece of farming or nomad history and was simply too good not to have.
We took it, got it home and stood it on the site which was to have borne the Ollie House. I think that is when the idea occurred. I raised a small vertical wall on two of its sides and roofed it. The back wall was plain except for two brass portholes [I think I was envisioning a ship’s cabin by that time] and the front, of course had a door. The grain storage spaces became sail lockers. My work being done, Frau set to “furnishing” the inside: a foam mattress on the upper level, carpet on the lower and dozens of cushions throughout. If it looked like a yacht cabin, then it was a very exotic one. Perhaps Errol Flynn may have had such, or Liberace, had he a yacht. There may be Parisian bordellos similarly decorated.
And so we belatedly had our Ollie House, and by the way, his picture hangs inside.
I was reminded of this because I recently came across a paper written by the eminent 19th century archaeologist Otto Benndorf, who recorded such a structure in Lycia in 1884 and pointed out the halved-joints, which were exactly as on our cedar box. Unfortunately Benndorf’s paper is in German and is not readily available. However a Google search for “history of art in Lycia” will throw up “History of art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia from the French of Georges Perrot.” In it, the author quotes Benndorf and his illustrations. On page 371, “The most original tomb in Lycia is also the most ancient and the reproduction on [sic] stone of a wooden construction.” Eight pages later is “Lycian Grannery” and shows almost exactly the Ollie House to illustrate the point.
Isn’t it strangely ironic that an ancestor of our recent and comparatively humble memorial to a dear sweet and simple man was used to inspire a far grander tomb for a dead prince perhaps 2,400 years earlier?
Benzer Haberler 
