An American crossing Turkey by bus sets out to trace the spread of Islam across Anatolia, only to find his journey unexpectedly tracked by an undercover police officer at a remote station in Diyarbakir. This story was written by a student on our Craft of Travel Writing Certification course.
“I am undercover Turkish police. I need your passport. Now.”
Great. I had landed in Turkey less than a day before on my southward journey to Mardin, and the Turkish police were already taking a clandestine interest. Apparently, entering the country legally at the tourist airport in Izmir wasn’t enough to forego scrutiny when you were travelling by bus in the direction of Iraq and Syria. So, with a pack on my back and a day bag on my front in the Diyarbakir bus exchange, I surrendered my passport to the officer who had exhausted the extent of his English with his opening salvo.
Encounters with undercover police demanding passports wasn’t something I was accustomed to as an American. In my home state of Texas, carrying an identification card wasn’t required as a part of your everyday life, and if an officer walked up and demanded you present one, you could simply walk away if you weren’t being detained. Having been a police officer myself once upon a time, plenty of people had walked away from me when I made the same request. But those American democratic sentiments stopped at the water’s edge. Our rights didn’t apply in foreign lands.
The officer took his time thumbing the pages of my passport. Given that I had been travelling for more than two consecutive years at this point, he had plenty of visas to examine. Five continents of entry and exit stamps, some of them for only a few days, made for a mountain of potential interrogation questions. I didn’t know how much this guy knew about the world, but as the lone undercover officer at Turkey’s southernmost major bus exchange, I figured he had to have at least moderate knowledge of the world, at least the places where tourists and Turks would visit.
What didn’t occur to me was that I was far off the foreign tourism path. The goal for my upcoming two-month trek across Turkey was to trace the spread of Islam across the lands of the former Islamic caliphates. My journey would take me from Mardin in Turkey’s southeast, near Syria, in a diagonal traversing the entire Anatolian peninsula to Edirne, in the northeast, near Greece. I relied heavily on ChatGPT to help me build the itinerary. That wasn’t a foolproof plan, but the outline it had given me seemed solid when doing my own research on each city. I knew I couldn’t travel too far east, as doing so required special permits from the Turkish government, so I settled on starting in Mardin, a city that had been home to Christians for nearly two thousand years before being captured by the Muslim armies of the Umayyad Caliphate in 639 AD. But to experience that history, I first had to actually arrive in the city, and to arrive in the city, I would need my passport–the passport that was now the sole focus of my Turkish counterpart.
After several minutes, the questioning began. Where was I travelling in Turkey? Did I know anyone in Mardin? What did I do for work? How much money did I have? All asked and answered through a translation app on his phone that was no doubt saving our conversation. That he had this app without knowing English told me he expected to encounter foreigners in this bus station. He wasn’t an immigration officer, but his questions felt like things I should have answered upon crossing the border before getting my visa stamp, not now in a bus station on the opposite side of the country. I wished that were the case, as I now had to explain two years of solo travel while unemployed to a man pulling a government salary while stationed at a frontier bus station. I relayed the story of my travels, explained that I had worked as a police officer before, and before that, I was in the American military. I saved my money for nearly a year, lived on a budget, had just explored Christianity on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and was now going to explore Islam in Turkey.
He listened with interest, taking notes the entire time, before asking the fateful question: “Can you prove any of this?“
Could I? How do you prove your entire life’s backstory while living out of a backpack on the Turkish frontier, just a couple of dozen miles away from the warzone that was Syria? It wasn’t like I kept ID cards from prior jobs to prove I used to work there, nor was I keen on handing over my phone for him to look through my pictures, but that was about the only option I had. They were timestamped, but not geo-tagged, a deliberate security choice on my part that could easily backfire if he looked for the metadata…which he did.
Unimpressed, almost irritated, with the lack of geo-tagged photos, the officer did exactly what I didn’t want him to do: he started looking through my phone. I didn’t have anything illegal on there, but I also didn’t want a foreign government ingesting all of my personal data into their intelligence and security apparatus. God only knew who they would share it with inside and outside official channels. Turkey may have been an American ally on paper, but the reality was much more complicated, given its special relationships with the Russians, Iraqis, and even Iranians. Not that I had much of a choice, possession being nine-tenths of the law, and not having the same rights to terminate the police encounter that I had back home. So, I watched as he scrolled through my Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and other accounts, taking pictures of the account information as he went. After finishing with my phone, he returned to my passport and took pictures of every page. Two-plus years of travel history funnelled into my Turkish police file as he snapped shot after shot.
That’s when he noticed the plastic card in my passport cover. I had forgotten it was there, but his face lit up as he recognized an American military ID card. American law prohibited anyone from taking a picture or photocopying military ID cards, but we weren’t in America. This close to the border with Syria, I could only watch as he uploaded it into the system. Seeing how his face lit up, I could only imagine what sort of catch this was for him this far east. At least it proved part of my story about having been in the military.
The undercover officer’s mood changed instantly with the find. His serious demeanour changed to almost light-heartedness as he replaced the card and returned my passport. As far as he was concerned, he had found and documented an American military member travelling the border with Syria. Until that point, I clearly hadn’t belonged and stuck out amongst the Turkish and Kurdish passengers that bustled around us. Now, my presence made sense, even though the idea that I was working for the American military was nowhere near the truth. I wasn’t going to argue the point; as long as it got me on my way to Mardin.
Satisfied with my identity and his version of my backstory, the conversation turned to my travel plans through Turkey. Naturally, he took a picture of the draft itinerary from my notebook and uploaded it to his system before wishing me bon voyage with a smile and a handshake. But as we each turned away, I to stash my passport and he to return to his office, the officer turned back and spoke into his phone for one last comment. “I entered your itinerary into the system, so anyone who stops you will know where you are going.”
Was that a warning? Should I expect to be stopped regularly? Or was he trying to reassure me that future encounters would be smooth? His answers were only limited by my imagination, as I didn’t have time to ask before he turned on his heel and darted off. With that final encounter rolling around my head, I turned to the bus destined for Mardin, the Syrian border, and the beginning of my two-month journey across Turkey, certain that my progress would be logged and checked against the page in my notebook. I may have been tracing Islam across Anatolia, but the police were now tracking me across Turkey.
