Under the Mountainous Sky: The Great Anatolian Donkey Trek

Once in a Thousand Years is Christopher Trillo's account of his and his companions' gruelling and exhilarating journey with donkeys across rural Anatolia, from the Sea of Marmara (almost) in the North to (within sight of) the Mediterranean in the South. The venture is fuelled by their love of Turkey. It is a journey to the rural heart of the country to experience a way of life still, at the time, in 1981, embedded in traditional ways and in symbiosis with nature.

The narrative follows the travellers as they cross a magnificent everchanging landscape, through dark forests, and parched plateaus wading through rivers, clambering over mountains. The journey is animated throughout by meetings with villagers, invariably resulting in invitations to eat, to stay, to share stories. Trillo's knowledge of Turkish allows for a deep interaction and understanding of the local people and their experiences, brought to life in vivid and affectionate descriptions.

The villagers play a central role in the narrative. Without their support, generosity and local knowledge the journey would have been entirely impossible. And travelling with donkeys provided the travellers instant access to village life. They immediately dispelled any initial suspicion or fear. They activated all the ready hospitality procedures: the food and shelter and good company of the hosts. Without detailed maps, the travellers were also entirely dependent on the villagers for directions. This allowed them to follow rough tracks from village to village, avoiding donkey-hostile main roads. Many of the villages they passed through were inaccessible to motor vehicles and without electricity

This is the portrait of a landscape and way of life, unchanged over centuries. Trillo, the academic Stephen Scoffham and the artist Simon Nicholas record a vanishing world in words, photographs, drawings and paintings. The images are beautiful and striking, often startlingly Biblical. The text is sparkling and highly evocative, offering a series of vignettes and descriptions, at times highly comic and at others vividly dramatic. It not only bears witness to the glories and disasters of the journey, but it also presents living portraits of the central characters, both donkey and human, through all their times of stress and elation.