The Ambar

We began noticing them on the drive from Inebolu to Sinop: single-story timber structures raised from the ground, supported by what look like the sort of rough-hewn bar tables you might see in a cowboy theme-y saloon. Storage facilities of some sort, we reasoned, something along the lines of the rice barns that dot the landscape in Thailand and Indonesia.

Turkey's Black Sea coast is corn country (though plenty of wheat is also grown there). In autumn nearly every rural house is festooned with garlands and bunches of drying cobs. These "corn barns", which we later learned are called ambar (a generic term for "storehouse"), is where farmers dried and stored their harvested corn (and other crops) while they waited for their turn at the village mill. In an ambar the goods would be safely out of the reach of the wild boar and other animals that roam the region's forested hills.

After days dogged by gray skies, confined by fairly constant rain to our room or one or another of Sinop's harbors! ide teahouses, we were bug-eyed. When we woke one morning to tentatively bright skies we immediately jumped in the car and took to the road.

We drove inland, away from the sea we'd been staring at for the better part of a week, and traced a two-lane blacktop deep into a bucolic valley. Here and there were the tinest of villages consisting of a single bufe (always well-stocked with freshly baked bread) and a handful of cottages. Plumes of smoke rising from gardens signalled pekmez in process: mothers and grandmothers cooking kilos and kilos of apples, pears, mulberries, figs and grapes into liters and liters of fruit molasses.

Alongside a river slicing through a middling mountain range trees were just beginning to show autumn colors. We breezed by a mid-sized town and kept on beyond the point at which the road became a pitted dirt track, pressing through hairpin turn after hairpin turn, drawn by the vista around the next corner, and the next.

There were ambar, plenty of them (by now we were a bit obsessed with these structures). When the road narrowed to nearly impassable we stopped at the base of a hill crowned by an especially handsome specimen and got out for photos.

While Dave was shooting, a window on what we'd taken to be an abandoned farmhouse opposite the ambar banged open and a kerchiefed head popped out. We heard a half-growl half-shout: "Who's there? What are you doing?! " S he looked dubious when I shouted back that we were just taking photographs of her ambar and slammed the window shut. A few moments later she emerged from the front door and toddled over to the gate, arms swinging.

"They're gorgeous! He's a photographer." I indicated the corn barn, tyring to explain why we'd hiked up a hill and on to her property, as she glared at me from beneath formidable brows. To tell the truth she scared me a little. Then, quite suddently, the clouds parted. Her face didn't soften, exactly, but she invited us in for tea.

Superlatives simply cannot express the beauty of her house, which her husband later told us was built of beechwood, by his father, over 60 years ago. We entered a ground floor layed with stone, a storage area for tools and bags of recently harvested walnuts and hazelnuts and, long ago, cattle and sheep and chickens.

Ladder stairs -- the steps, made of 2-inch thick boards, so solid underfoot -- led to an entry area with a curtained kitchen nook (recently updated by her son, with a marble countertop, new sink and taps and handcarved wood bench) to the left and two bedrooms ahead. One bedroom was empty save for a cloth spread over the floor; it was covered with drying corn kernals.

Habiba -- after a while I felt bold enough to ask her name -- led us into a darkish sitting brightened by two windows, one with a fine view down the hill we'd just snaked our way up, directed us to a low cushioned bench along one wall. Outside it was cold enough to require gloves and heavy wool socks, bu! t the ro om was toasty warm from a wood-fired stove. She left us there to admire the timber walls, gleaming from age and smoke, and returned with tea makings.

We talked about her family -- three sons and a daughter, all grown and living Istanbul. Grandkids too, and everyone comes back to the village every summer to stay and enjoy the fresh air and cool temperatures. As she talked Habiba loosened up a bit. She was 64 or 65, she said, she couldn't be sure. She'd grown up in the area, she loved these hills: "You should see it in springtime!"

We must eat something, she insisted, even though it was past lunchtime We declined, Habiba persisted, and we gave in. While she was in the kitchen her husband Kazim returned home. He looked shocked, momentarily, upon opening the door door to find two yabanci drinking tea in his sitting room. But Kazim regained his composure quickly, and offered us more tea.

He and Habiba set up a low folding table in front of us, then carried in plate after plate of food. Kazim ate with us (Habiba demurred, saying she'd already eaten): tomatoes, long green mild peppers, cheese and gently pickled romano beans that Habiba warmed in oil over a burner on the wood stove. Tea for him, orange Fanta for Dave and me. As the three of us ate Habiba pulled hunks of bread from a big loaf she kept in a plastic bag on a shelf near the door. She peeled hard-boiled eggs and placed them on our plates.

Kazim told us about growing up in the house, how he was seven years old when his father built it with his own hands. He described a village more populous than it is now, how the mosque just minutes from their door was packed with the faithful every Friday afternoon (it's now closed). He told us about the mill down by the river that his father and all the other farmers went to with their corn and their wheat. How as a boy he listened to the cows and the sheep beneath moving beneath the floorboards as he drifted off to sleep, how every autumn the ambar was stacked to its rafters with corn and other fruits of the harvest.

He and Habiba adore each other. It's lovely to see. When she checked his watch and pulled a sack of pills from beneath her sweater -- ''I was in the hospital last month, for few days," she murmured -- Kazim watched her worriedly. When we heard the clank of a jerryrigged oil can bell, hung just outside the house to scare away animals from the garden, Habiba shook her head, smilingly sideways at Kazim, and said "That's his work." He shrugged his shoulders and smiled back.

Every year in late autumn the couple slaughter their few chickens, pack them up along with bushels of hazelnuts and walnuts and board an overnight bus to Istanbul, where they spend the winter with their family. Not necessarily willingly -- when they were younger they stuck out the cold and the snow in the old house. "No more though," Kazim said. "There's no taxi, no bus to go into town. Sometimes no electricity. It's too isolated. We enjoy Istanbul but ...."

After finishing lunch we stayed for two glasses of tea. Habiba was looking tired and Kazim was clucking after her, so we made to leave. They walked us downstairs, Kazim taking quiet but obvious pride in the the photographs Dave took of the house's wood beams and planks, of the storage area with its! hooks h anging the baskets he and Habiba use to collect walnuts and apples. He understood why we'd stopped to photograph the ambar. "Yes, it's beautiful," he said.

Neither Kazim nor Habiba wanted their photograph taken. "We're too old and too ugly!" she cried, shooing Dave away.

"But come back in the spring, in May, after we retur,n from Istanbul" she said as she handed us a bag of black walnuts. "This place in the springtime, you can't imagine how wonderful it is. It's like heaven on earth."