AFEZ OF THE HEART


JEREMY SEAL


Jeremy Seal set out across Turkey, in the extremes of
winter, to trace the astonishing history of a cone-shaped
hat. He soon saw the fez as the key by which Turkey,
beset by contradictions, might be understood.

'Original and beautifully observed, the book reads like
Chatwin with jokes' Independent

'A Fez of the Heart had won me over before I even
opened it ... It is the best travel book I have read
this year'
Patrick French, Daily Telegraph

'Intelligent, funny and informative travelogue . . . Not
so much a book about hats as a skilled and entertaining
portrait of modern Turkey' Sunday Times

'An intelligent, subtle and original book that seamlessly
combines travel writing with political analysis' Sunday Telegraph

'Armchair travellers can rarely have had such a
delightfully eccentric guide as Jeremy Seal . . . weaves
history, personal and illuminating observation into a
sprightly seamless whole' Scotland on Sunday

'A terrific travel book, insightful and beautifully
written'
Guardian

The best portrait of contemporary Turkey available in
English today. It's also extremely funny'
William DalrympleJeremy Seal has worked in publishing, taught in Turkey and
now writes travel articles for publications including the Daily
Telegraph, The Times and the Sunday Times. This is his first
book. He lives in Gloucestershire.
A Fez of the Heart





'Entertaining, witty and original, Jeremy Seal's is an extraordinarily
informative and sympathetic account of modern Turkey's dilemmas illuminated
by the author's compendious knowledge of Turkish headgear.
Superbly written and fascinating' - Paul Micou

'Seal's history of the fez is a brilliant idea, a mock-serious investigation
of the all but forgotten headgear, as a way of illuminating the tensions
of Turkish life . . . very engaging'-Justin Cartwrjght, The Times

'A truly beguiling book' - Hardy Amies, Literary Review

'There are a thousand reasons for writing a book, many of them more
bizarre than Jeremy Seal's notion that he might discover the soul
of Turkey through a pursuit of her national hat - the fez. But seldom
will they produce a book so charmingly eccentric . . . No ordinary
travelogue, the book is more an entertaining mix of history, politics
and conversation . . . It's also very funny' - Marie Claire

'A magical journey through the many contradictions of modern
Turkey' - GQ

'He weaves into the tale such lively, frank and touching descriptions of
country life that it ranks as the best travel book on Turkey this decade' - Cornucopia

'Jeremy Seal has produced what any fair-minded reader would simply
call a modern travel classic . . . Good title. Good book' - Herald Express

'It is with a noble spirit of myth-breaking that Jeremy Seal takes us
through modern Turkey . . . A Fez of the Heart is well worth reading
... It works for Seal (as it did for V. S. Naipaul in India), as he pursues
his quietly metaphorical hunt for the lost fez' - Tom Hiney, Spectator

JEREMY SEAL

Jeremy Seal has worked in publishing, taught in Turkey and
now writes travel articles for publications including the Daily
Telegraph, The Times and the Sunday Times. This is his first
book. He lives in Gloucestershire.


A Fez of the Heart







TRAVELS
AROUND TURKEY
IN SEARCH
OF
A HAT





PICADOR
First published 1995 by Picador
This edition published 1996 by Picador
an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd
25 Eccleston Place, London swiss
and Basingstoke
Associated companies throughout the world

ISBN 0330 34362 9

Copyright 0 1995 Jeremy Seal
The right of Jeremy Seal to be identified as the

author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying. recording Or otherwise)

without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation

to this publication may be liable to criminal

prosecution and civil claims for damages.

7986

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library.

Typeset by CentraCet Limited, Cambridge

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out,
or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent
in any form of binding or covet other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.acknowledgements

I AM INDEBTED to the staff of the Turkish National Tourist Office
in London, particularly Aysen St Clair Abbot and Mustafa Turkmen.
The advice, assistance, and considerable knowledge of Ghislain
Sireilles at specialist tour operators Simply Turkey in London was
invaluable.

Philip Mansel was an inexhaustible source of information.
Thanks too to Professor Anthony Bryer, Mary Burkett, Dr Celia
Carslake, Peter Lane, John Norton, Sir Mark Russell, Khalil Sara,
Jennifer Scarce, Sarah Searight, and Roddy Taylor. Thanks also to
the library staff at the Royal Asiatic Society, the British Library, and
the National Art Library at the V&A.

In Istanbul nobody was more generous in their assistance and
good company than the staff of the admirable Cornucopia Magazine: John Scott, Berrin Torolsan, and Arzu Musa. I would also like to
thank Guldenir Kurtar, Mary Isin, Ziyad Ebbuzia, Oya Eczacabasi,
Gullum Yalcintepe, and Ahmet Kayikci. Particular thanks go to
Erdogan Akyuz for barely prompted, tireless research on my behalf.

Jane Bradish-Ellames at Curtis Brown and all at Picador, particularly
Peter Straus and Rachel Heath, have been model agents and
publishers respectively, and excellent company as well.

Love and thanks to Conrad Bird, Sophie Cottrell, Tom Owen
Edmunds, Katie Hickman, Nick Tudball, and Pete Moller, who
slave-drove damaged minds on the morning of New Year's Day
1992 in Northumberland. This book was their idea. Also to Justin
Creedy Smith, for the author photo and his friendship and enthusiasm
on numerous trips to Turkey. And, as ever, to Ash.
author's note
The Turkish letter is pronounced as sir, g- is silent. Umlauts
on 'o' and 'a' simply serve to skew the pronounciation of the
vowel. In some cases, the conventional anglicization of Turkish words has been retained. The correct Turkish 'inpllah'
appears as the more familiar inshallah, 'Inc' appears as haj, 'hoca' as hoja. (The Turkish 'c' is pronounced like j.) This
inconsistency should help readers avoid confusions of
pronunciation.
'I think it is that you are trying to be something
which you never can be, something which nobody
with any sense would wish to be -- a European.'
British traveller Marmaduke Pickthall
in conversation with a 'gloomy' Turk
If the cap fits, wear it

English adage

prologue
'When you make a world for tourists you make a lie, a
patchwork from all the coats you have shed.'
Mary Lee Settle
BY THE SHORES of the Turkish Mediterranean they once built
a city beyond reproach. Such a city that nothing, it was said,
could steal from its grandeur. And then they named it Pomegranate,
or Side in the Turkish.
And so, as the city dwindled to a village over the centuries
and only passing armies gave any indication that new empires
were afoot, the people made an unremarkable living -- the
fishermen from mullet and the farmers from lamb -- among
the fallen capitols and pilasters, plinths and pediments, columns
and statuary of the ruined city of their forefathers.
Among the masonry, coins from the second century featuring
Nike, Goddess of Victory, lay in dust-strewn profusion.
Children might dig up the coins as a temporary distraction
while the years passed in uneventful succession, people grew
old, and the poppies bloomed and died. The catch was landed
in the small port, the muezzin sounded mournfully from the
minaret five times a day. So life unravelled, and the meaning
was revealed in its pattern, and for two thousand years the
pattern was enough.

By the 1980s, however, the sons of those same fishermen
and farmers had discovered the value of the coins and sold
them to the local museum. Old Nike for new, they spent their
earnings on shedding themselves in the latest trainers and set
about running hotels and restaurants where the menus offered
fisherman's mallet and farmer's lamp. They touted boot trips
to those interested in boots, hired out deck chairs, sold



paragliding experiences, chased young girls from Southend
through Pomegranate's discotheques in the hope that they
might lie down with them, and whispered sweet bitte schons at
fat women from Dortmund that they might buy a leather
jacket or a bag to remind them of their time here, in this place
of labels whence the echoes of the past had long since fled.
I am left with a man I never met, a few stonings fuelled lx) outrage, and a purple hat they no longer wear.

Mustafa Yildirim saw little of the 1980s. In 1982, he would die
in Pomegranate, the village where he had been born and had
lived his entire life. Mustafa could tell his children nothing of
his origins, only that a Greek family had taken pity on an
orphan boy and assisted by providing him with a donkey to
set him on his way through life. By dint of hard work and an
orphan's instinct for survival, Mustafa graduated from donkey
owner to farmer while his benefactors vanished in the GrecoTurkish
population exchanges of the 1920s.

In the reforming, Westernizing years of the 1930s, a decree
went out that all Turkish citizens were to be counted. Everybody
was to stay at home and usefully occupy themselves on
census day. How the injunction was widely interpreted only
became clear nine months later when a previously unknown
first name -- Nufus, meaning population or census -- enjoyed a
popularity as widespread as it was short-lived.
So countless, however, were the Ahmet Son of Mehmets
and the Mehmet Son of Alimets, the patronymics by which
Turks were then known, that the census largely fell into
Confusion, and in 1935, before a further census was attempted,
another decree went out that all Turkish citizens were first to
find themselves a surname.
After eighteen months, the warning went, those families
which had failed to find themselves a surname to their liking
would be fined and supplied with one of the district official's
choosing. Many citizens needed no such incentive. Admit tedly, some, such as the Turks arriving from Crete in the
population exchanges who often called themselves Giritli, or
Mr and Mrs From Crete, were unimaginative in their choice.
But others adopted names such as Overthrower of Mountains,
Eagle-eyed, Pure Turk and Lion-hearted. Army officers named
themselves after victories for which they believed themselves
to have been solely responsible, ministers after rivers which
they had helped establish as national frontiers. The country's
President chose Father of the Turks to add to his first names,
Mustafa Kemal, while Pomegranate's rather more humble
Mustafa ended up with the surname Lightning.

Mustafa Yildirirn could not remember much about the
genesis of his surname. He could not remember paying a fine.
Nor, unlike the President, could he ever quite explain what
the name meant. It may have been a fanciful reference to
orphan origins so obscure that he could only have come from
the sky. Or perhaps it referred to the legendary speed at which
he worked his fields -- and certainly the same nimble energy is
evident in the inherited movements of his son, Halil. But the
surname always makes Halil think of something else, an
abiding childhood memory of his own. He remembers being
commanded to stand near his industrious father in those pre
electricity nights, protecting with his child's frame and cupped
hands from buffeting gusts of sea-blown wind the flickering
naked flame of the torch by which his father guided the furrow
of his plough.

Halil is now a successful Pomegranate hotelier, but he has
not forgotten his father. [he tools of the old man's trade such
as the wooden ploughs and the threshing sleds -- horse-drawn
slabs of walnut from whose base diagonal lines of flints
protrude to separate wheat from chaff -- have been tidied up,
varnished, and displayed around the hotel, along with photographs
of an ancient face, to commemorate the man and his
way of life. Even the baggy shalvar trousers of Mustafa amja --
old man Mustafa -- have been loving patched, washed, and
ironed, and draped over one of the ploughshares.The tools of Halil's trade are fax machines, tour operators,
a facility with profit margins and exchange rates, charm, and
foreign languages. No son will build such a memorial to Halil
-- a wall adorned with his typewriter, Filofax, and a sheaf of
holiday brochures above beach shorts and sunglasses -- and not
only because it would look ridiculous. Halil knows that there
never were, nor will be, such differences in Pomegranate
livelihood and lifestyle as existed between him and his father,
and their respective generations. There is a yawning gulf
between their lives that cannot be closed, only recognized. The
shrine is testimony to a time when life in Pomegranate changed
so fast that the tools of working men were museum pieces
before those who once had used them had had time to die.

It was hard to imagine a more achingly beautiful place than
Pomegranate in the early seventies. The pioneering trickle of
independent tourists certainly thought so. The locals, who
took such scenic magnificence for granted, were struck instead
by these visitors whose behaviour was quite as strange as their
clothes, colourful and entirely absent below knee and elbow.
In July and August, when the villagers were indulging in
lengthy recesses from the heat of the day, these people could
be seen pottering around the ruins of ancient temples and the
amphitheatre, puzzling over fallen friezes before taking themselves
off to undress -- as well as men, women! -- on the long
beach that fringes the peninsular where Pomegranate stands.
According to the sleepy but indignant village commentary that
raised a cloud of drowsy wasps as it issued from beneath the
shady vine trellises of homes and tea houses, the ruins had
been there as long as anyone could remember and hardly
merited exploring in the baking heat of high summer, while
even the infidel Greeks in the old days, the oldest villagers
readily confirmed, had never undressed on the beach.

Not that it was for the villagers to wonder why. Turkey
had long been host to the unpredictable tidetables of invasion that had thrown up the Hittites and Mongols, Romans and
Persians, Selcuks and Ottomans, and countless others besides.
On the great Eurasian land bridge unsolicited visits from
passers-by were largely considered to come with the territory,
and the people of Pomegranate were habitually sympathetic to
requests for billeting or a glass of fortifying tea.
So some Pomegranate families were prompted to clear
spare rooms and offer them to the latest arrivals as pansiyon accommodation. The more enterprising among them even
dared, having heard the practice was acceptable, to charge a
few lira at the end of the visitors' stay.
But the first signs of trouble were not long in coming.
Some visitors started to wander back from the beach in their
bikinis and so caused grave offence among a profoundly
traditional Muslim population. For whatever else the Mongols
had done, they had kept out of bikinis. Signs in atrocious
English and German -- 'Bikini in village No' -- were erected on
street corners in an attempt to stem the offence. Unsurprisingly,
these signs proved incomprehensible as much in concept
as language to French visitors who had been largely brought
up on nude sunbathing and doubtless thought slipping on a
bikini for a jaunt through town might label them as puritan
killjoys. As a result, several of them were stoned by incensed
villagers.
Bruised and bemused, the French were driven back to the
beach, but the influx of tourists was not discouraged. Pomegranate's
twenty-five-bed capacity soon doubled, and doubled
again, setting a pattern for the years to come. Pansiyon owners
even started requisitioning the rough notice-boards which had
recently railed against bikinis on which they might advertise
their bed and breakfast rates. Suddenly, there was a new
livelihood called turizm, predicated on the astounding discovery
that foreigners seemed happy to pay for the things --
accommodation, meals, and even visits to ruins -- that the local
people had always marked down under hospitality. It was not
surprising then that Halil Yildirim should wake up early onespring morning as a young man and decide he no longer
wanted to be a farmer.
By the spring morning in 1992 when I arrived, it was
obvious that there were very few farmers indeed left in
Pomegranate. I had set out for the village at dawn from a nearby town on a minibus crammed with men and women
employed in servicing Pomegranate's shops and restaurants,
and its hotel beds, now estimated to be anywhere in number
between forty and a hundred thousand. The minibus came to
a premature halt when the engine emitted a valedictory thud,
wheezed a bit, and abruptly died. Then the improvised towrope
by which we continued soon frayed and gave within a
mile of the town while our tow disappeared round the corner,
quite unaware of our parting.
By the time we had reached the new tourist bus station on
the village outskirts, the fleet of tractor-hauled trolleys was in
service shuttling European visitors, dressed in yellows and
pinks above fat-dimpled, sun-fried flesh, through the shimmer
of the red poppies among the unkempt fields into town.
I dressed to the sight of Pomegranate putting out flags, the
white crescent and star on a red background of the Turkish
Republic. The flags hung from every house, carpet shop, and
kebab stand, draped fragments of a heraldic solar system. It
was May 19, a public holiday commemorating the day in 1919
when a gallant young Turkish officer called Mustafa Kemal
landed on a distant Turkish Black Sea coast, far from the
White Sea as the Mediterranean is locally known, at a town
called Samsun.
At Samsun, Mustafa Kemal set about assembling opposition
to the proposed dismemberment of what remained of
the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the Great War. With
the compliance of a cowed government, an international treaty
had condemned the defeated empire to a carve-up that would
satisfy the territorial interests of her enemies, Russia, France,
Italy, Britain, and Greece, and also grant nationhood to
numerous subject peoples of the former empire. 'Turkey', as
my Philips New Handy General Atlas (1930) details the treaty
clauses, 'to cede the greater part of Thrace to Greece together
with Smyrna [now Izmir] and its hinterland. Turkey to
recognize the independence of Armenia, Kurdistan, Mesopotamia,
Syria, and the Hejaz, the British Protectorates over
Egypt, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and Cyprus, that of France
over Tunisia and French Morocco, and Italian sovereignty
over Libya and the Dodecanese.' All that the Turks would
retain was a pitiful shred of Black Sea littoral, an Anatolian
Gaza Strip.
But in brackets below the atlas' treaty details are the two
words 'never ratified'. May 19 celebrates the emergence of
Turkish nationhood and of an attendant national identity
against the longest odds. Without heroism, a long war, plenty
of luck, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the belief has often been
expressed, Turkey would not now exist.
By 1923, Ataturk had driven the Allies into the sea. The
massive paradox that I walked straight into as I set out to
explore was that they might as well not have bothered, for
despite that Turkish victory and excepting the ubiquitous
Turkish flag, Turkey did not seem to exist in Pomegranate
that morning.
On the main street, the incursions of English and German
had rendered Turkish a minority language. Turkish food had
been replaced by 'handburgers', and even the ubiquitous doner
kebab was being advertised as 'authentik Turkische cuisine', as
if this staple of Turkish food could only hold its own by being
touted as a gastronomic heritage experience. Here was the
grilled red mallet, the lamp chops, even a distinctly unappetizing
fried squit, something called stew of bot, bolloknese and
cold drings. You could have your potatoes French freud
regardless of psycho-Austrian objections. The music that
drowned out the muezzin in the village's one mosque was
Euro-pop. On the beach, serried ranks of oiled European
breasts jiggled in the sun while the postcards on the nearby
stands brazenly endorsed them with complementary images oftopless girls and voluptuous buttocks ornamented with the

briefest of G-strings above the bald statement: No Problem in
Turkey.

One thing was clear: that underdressed Gallic retreat, a
beachwards scuttle in a hail of traditionalist stones, had at
some point been halted. The bikini signs had been taken down,
the locals had come up with a new message in tidy English,
and relaunched it on postcards as the slogan of a radically
reinvented society, one that claimed to have gone from stonings
to toplessness in twenty years. The retreat which had
once seemed headlong was now exposed as a canny French
feint; bikinis had established a bridgehead in town, and bared
breasts were dug in on the beach. Where the Anzacs had failed,
the mammarial brigades of package-holiday Europe had
triumphed. 'I do not command you to obey me,' Mustafa
Kemal had told his troops at Gallipoli in 1915. 'I command
you to die.' And so they had gone to Paradise in such numbers
that the sheer weight of their discarded bodies alone prevented
the Allies from securing the Dardanelles, the very key to
Constantinople, now Istanbul. Surveying the beach below me,
the entire heroic exercise seemed pointless.

The Turkish tourist office recently screened a promotional
film in London. Images of mosques and markets, fresh vegetables
and leather jackets were punctuated by insistent close
ups of naked breasts until it seemed that Turkey's beaches
were nothing but a kind of bosomy paradise. When the film
throttled itself mid-reel, our quick-thinking host blamed
Saddam Hussein for the film's demise, but those who incline
to a belief in outside agencies might have looked instead to the
inflamed spirit of Turkey herself, courteous, traditional, and
above all Islamic, where a good many women will not show
their faces, let alone their breasts.
All afternoon, I wandered through Pomegranate's avenues
of boutiques that sold Naf-Naf and Chanel, Moschino and
Lacoste, T-shirts and sun-hats, sun cream and perfumes,
leather jackets and foreign currencies, bags, jewellery, and
carpets. Indolent young men wearing shades, purple Italian
suits, and manelike hairstyles, long ashes drooping from the
cigarettes clamped between their fingers, prowled outside their
shopfronts, whispering their siren bitte schons to the bulging
shadows of passing women. Tulip-shaped glasses of dark tea,
that indiscriminate gesture of Turkish goodwill, had been
withdrawn from the streets to lurk in strategic reserve among
the weaponry of the Pomegranate sales arsenal in case the
semblance of generosity that the offer of tea suggested might
be deployed to banish any lingering doubts from the mind of a
prospective buyer. In Pomegranate, sales were the priority,
with sex shaded into second -- but a close second which meant
buying ruinously expensive drinks for impressionable young
foreign girls in Pomegranate's discotheques. Stratonicus, quite
a card in his time, was once asked whom he regarded as the
most rascally of people. In Pamphylia,' he replied, 'the men
of Phaselis; in the whole world the men of Pomegranate.'
Pomegranate, you see, was also in Pamphylia.

Not that you would have guessed by the 1990s, when
Pomegranate had travelled so far towards a European ideal,
modern and liberal, that the old names had fallen away, such
associations with the past no longer sustainable, terminally
broken by the sheer weight of Nat-Naf and fried squit.
Since I had not been in Pomegranate long enough to make
a seasoned judgement, I made the quite unseasoned one that
the town was on the wrong end of nothing less than a Faustian
pact with the worst aspects of the twentieth century. life used
to be fun,' Halil told me. Now it's just business.' In its
twenty-year transformation, it seemed that Pomegranate had
lost more than it had gained, and it was hard to see what could
reclaim it. For Mustafa Yildirim was dead ten years now, the
signs signifying outrage were long gone, and there was no
more talk of stonings in Pomegranate.
Then I noticed the fezzes, and in them was a reminder
taking me back to a family attic and the accumulations there
of a family history, far from the noise of an everyday foreignculture being strangled by the sound of holidaymaking. I
remembered dust and slanted sunshine, old cardboard boxes
and yellowing newsprint, powdered cobweb and desiccated
spiders. I saw an old sewing machine, a chipped vase, sepia
photographs, and mildewed leather suitcases, and sea charts
rolled together for so long that they remained tightly furled
long after the elastic that once bound them had perished and
given way. And in the midst of it all was the red felt fez,

tasselled and conical, which seemed to have been in that attic
for ever.

The fezzes were piled forlornly in a shop corner, gathering
dust. I lifted one from the pile and as I ran a hand across the
felt the dust retreated ahead of my fingers, furling up like a
reefed sail into a discernible line of grey fluff. Now the felt appeared as a deep, lustrous maroon, and the tassle gleamed
snake-black. A young man, who had just attended to a woman
wearing an `I love Dortmund' T-shirt, sidled over. 'All night
long,' he cooed tentatively to the half-understood lyrics of the
Lionel Richie song playing in the background.

`I understood these hats were forbidden in Turkey,' I told
him, vaguely remembering that Ataturk had outlawed the fez
in 1925.

'For us, they are forbidden,' he replied in halting English.
'For tourists, they are -- ' he searched for the word in vain --
`bidden. But we don't like fezzes anyway. They are not
modern. Fezzes are Ottoman. Fezzes are Islam.'
The young man directed me through the trinkets. 'I think
you prefer one of these,' he said and placed a baseball cap on
my head. A supine, scantily clad girl had been embroidered
above the peak below the old refrain, No Problem in Turkey.

The full force of her rounded buttocks weighed upon my
brow.
'No,' I replied. 'I'll take a fez, thank you.'
'I think you are not modern,' pronounced the shopkeeper,
making my predicament sound like a will-making condition.
Ashamed that he stocked such things, he wrapped my illicit
headgear in a brown paper bag and saw me on my way.
Tut I am happy,' I replied as I walked out into the warm
spring sunshine, fez under my arm, and down through the
throbbing disco-beat to the sea.
My fez was cheap, and not very well made, as if to accord
with its banal trinket status. How had it come to such a pass,
this once grand hat, the hat of the greatest empire of the East,
of the Sultan and of Allah? What was the untold thread of
history that had led to this humiliation, now serving as a brief
distraction for tourists? Hearteningly, however, I recognized
that my fez had embarrassed the young shopkeeper. Evidently,
the old associations still clung to it, enough of them at least so
that it sounded a tellingly discordant note in the glossy melody
that was modern Pomegranate. Like the stoning parties, the
badly written signs, the life of Mustafa Yildirim, it was an
awkward reminder that Pomegranate had changed, and a key
to a past that the village had washed its Pilate hands of.
Perhaps, it occurred to me, I could use this hat.

In Pomegranate, an exhaustive search turned up a single fez
wearer. I peered through windows, glanced into the back
rooms of shadowy grocer's shops, hung around the mosque,
and searched the most back-street -- although Pomegranate
didn't get that back-street -- of the bars, only to find him
standing outside a restaurant above the beach. For a moment,
I dared to hope that his taste in headgear indicated an inclination
to reactionary subversion, but his greeting put me
straight.
'Fried squit?' he asked.
'I've eaten,' I lied, and pointed at his fez. 'I thought it was
illegal to wear that.'
'My boss like me to wear it,' he replied in English. 'He
think to bring tourists.' From his disgruntlement, it was
apparent that he was an unwilling fez wearer. In as much as
it struck me that there were easier ways to attract custom,like making a few spelling amendments to the menu, I
sympathized.
'But it's not illegal?' I persisted.
'Not illegal to wear for the tourists, but in normal life . .
He brought his wrists together to indicate handcuffs. 'Big
problem in Turkey.'
His words, a pointedly juxtaposed echo of the postcard
slogan, highlighted a curious fact; by law, you could go topless
in this Middle Eastern and almost exclusively Muslim country
but you could not wear a fez. These reflections set me off at
speed and without brakes down a metaphorical cul-de-sac to
arrive at an unavoidable comparison of breasts and fezzes.
Little, it struck me, was more quintessentially Turkish than
the fez; little was less representative of the country than breast
covered beaches. Was one to be banned while the other was
encouraged? Was Turkey really more at ease with breasts than
fezzes? It was as if the country's enduring search for its own
identity -- Eastern or Western, Islamic or secular, traditional or
liberal -- was encapsulated in these two contrasting objects and
their symbolic payloads that even in shape had a certain
resemblance. Pink flesh or purple felt?

Mustafa Yildirim would have been a young boy when
fezzes were last legal in Turkey. It was too late to ask him
what he had made of his life. I only had the son's recollections
of a man who knew nothing of fake Moschino bags and of
fried squit and who had never tried to learn the lyrics of Lionel
Richie songs. He had ploughed his fields during the night and
wandered breast-free beaches, offered his spare room to passing
travellers and shared his bread and water in the shade of an
olive tree.
Perhaps it is only the privileged outsider that can afford to
do so, but I recoiled from what Pomegranate had become and
sided with the remnants, the memory of Mustafa, the outrage
of the stoning parties, the badly written signs, and the outlawed
fez. In them I detected a reminder that the truth could
not be denied. The truth was that far from being fairly representative of Turkey, Pomegranate was unrecognizable as
such. Pomegranate had tried to drag the Turkish hinterland
into the modern world and not yet turned round to discover
that under a strain that could not be borne the tow-rope had
long since broken.
For in the hinterland beyond the poppies that Pomegranate
had left behind, the veil was said to be widespread. An
intensive mosque-building programme had been under way in
the country for several years. The number of Turks making
the haj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, was increasing annually.
Journalists with secular views were routinely murdered by
shadowy terror groups. And the fez, symbolic of a general
orthodoxy that would have been scandalized and saddened by
what Pomegranate had become, had not simply gone out of
fashion. Those who persisted in wearing the fez had been
marched to the gallows in a ruthless attempt to hasten its
eradication. No Problem in Turkey?

It might even be, it struck me, that the fez clung on in the
mountainous, suspicious hinterland. For if it only survived as
a tourist trinket devoid of meaning, then why the discomfort
of the young shopkeeper who had sold me my fez? I preferred
to believe it still had the power to remind Pomegranate's Turks
of a past they preferred to deny, a kind of amulet against
Turkish self-deception. So when I set off down the Turkish
road in search of the end of a broken tow-rope, I took my fez
with me.Winterchapter one
IT WAS JANUARY 1993 when a kindly but disbelieving Turk
in an ill-fitting suit and a homburg approached me as our flight
was called at Heathrow Airport.
'Why are you going to Turkey?' he asked, without
unnecessary preamble. This rhetorical question was partly
prompted by the fact that it was the middle of winter, but I
did not doubt that it also harboured residual traces of a belief
prevalent among Turks for hundreds of years; that I was
travelling in the wrong direction.
West has been best for Turkish ideologues and leaders ever
since the eleventh century when they and their people upped
their Central Asian sticks and relocated to Anatolia. What with
the scorched earth chic inspired by the Mongols, you could do
that in those days, and with the capture of Constantinople in 1453 the Turks could make the first of many claims to be
European. These, they might have felt in a far-sighted
moment, would one day lend substance to their applications
for EC membership. The fact that they would be competing
for World Cup places alongside Italy and Germany instead of
soft touches like Afghanistan and China may have been
considered a price worth paying.
Eventually, this western impetus carried them to the very
gates of Vienna where the Ottoman army encamped during
the great sieges of 1529 and 1683, setting down a fabulous
image that has at once haunted and enthralled Christendom
ever since. The camp was pitched in front of the city in the
form of a huge half-moon Islamic crescent, the thirty thousand
tents visibly overshadowed by those of the Sultan and Grand Vizier, which were covered in hangings of richest tissue
coloured green and striped with gold. Gold too, great knobs
of solid gold, were the pinnacles above their tents, while
carpets, cushions, and divans within were studded with jewels.
Deep inside was a sanctuary housing the sacred standard of the
Prophet, and baths, fountains, flower gardens, and menageries.
At the entrance, five hundred archers of the Royal Guard kept
watch while thousands of turbaned infantrymen and black
eunuchs passed among the field harems and their concubines,
the Ottoman military kitchens filled with bejewelled silverware,
the Turkish baths and bedrooms hung with priceless
satins and velvets. And beyond them grazed the twenty
thousand mules, horses, and camels of the baggage trains, and
the four hundred ships of the Imperial flotilla moored upon the
grey depths of the Danube.

On the other side of the walls was no such extravagance.
Beef in Vienna was twelve times its price prior to the beginning
of the sieges. Poultry could not be bought at any price. Cats,
no longer exempted from the dinner table, were chased
through cellars and over roofs until the Viennese came to
know them as dachshasen, or roof hares.

A besieged, desperate population of cat eaters quivering at
the Islamic scourge outside the walls is thus imagined, and
doubtless there were plenty of Turks ready to confirm the
worst of such fears. Even so, this bewitchingly forceful image
may yet be misleading. Listen carefully, it seems to me, and
rather than the merciless proclamations and chants of an army
intent on malevolence one may actually hear among the tents and the majesty the muted 'Can we join you?' of a people
pleading to belong. On Turkey's summer beaches, in the bars
and by the backgammon tables where the Europeans can be
found, it is a request the Turks are still making.
For the Turks never did get into Vienna. As European
armies got stronger, further Westernization by simple geography
became increasingly expensive on soldiery. So they by
and large stayed where they were and consolidated their empire
20 by incorporating weak neighbours to the south while their
leaders introduced new hats of an increasingly Western tint
every century or thereabouts. The march which had been
foiled on the ground would continue in the mind. If they
couldn't get there in their boots, then they'd do so in hats
instead.
In the defining moments of their national history, the
British have their Magna Carta, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo,
Reform Bill, Battle of Britain. The Turks have their hats.
In 1826, the turban was abolished in Turkey and replaced
by the fez. In 1925, the fez was outlawed and replaced by
Homburgs, panamas, bowlers, and flat caps. And so a series
of hats have provided the stepping-stones, the caravanserais on
the central theme of Turkish history, her great march westwards
towards the promised land represented by that ultimate
measure of Westernization -- the bare head.

There was the rest, of course; the rise of a splendid empire
and the passing of Sultans, an endless succession of wars, the
fall of the Ottomans and the rise of the republic, and a series
of coups, but always there were hats. In Turkey, headgear has
since time immemorial had a symbolic significance inconceivable
in the West. In Turkey even today, you are largely
identified by what you wear on your head. Your headgear acts
as your badge of cultural and religious affiliation. The problem
comes when your choice of hat is prescribed. Rather than a
complex expression of your own personality, your headgear
may now originate in a simple memo sent by the head of state
to his ministry responsible for hats. The cap that once fitted
becomes the hat permitted, and leads to headgear that may not
be of your choosing.

For many Turks, then, the march westwards has been a
forced one. In 1950, the election defeat of the avowedly secular
Republican People's Party at the hands of a party promising
extended religious freedoms led to an outbreak of illegal fez
wearing in eastern Turkey; and in 1989, the 'turban affair',
when female students flouted legislation banning Islamichead-gear in Turkey's educational establishments, led to demonstrations,
civil disorder, and assassinations.
In 1993, Turkey had been embarked for several years on
her third European siege. Only this time her forces were
encamped not in tents outside Vienna but in the international
hotels of Brussels, with showers where they once had Turkish
baths, mini-bars where they once had field kitchens, portable
telephones where they once had envoys, and bare heads where
they once wore turbans, lobbying for full membership of the
European Community. They claimed that Turkish democracy
-- something of an oxymoron during the coup-ridden sixties,
seventies, and eighties had finally come of age.

Certainly, the voices of dissent, which once had been lost
in interminable prison terms and torture chambers, could now
be heard. Refah, the Islamic Welfare Party which advocates
the restitution of the sheriat, or Islamic law, was garnering an
increasing number of votes. 'There was a growing disenchantment
with the West, not only because its various promises were coming to sound increasingly hollow but more specifically
because it was considered To have been criminally negligent
in its attempts to relieve the plight of. rile Bosnia:.
Muslims, with whom the Turks feel an acute sense of kinship
not only as brothers in Islam but also because the Bosnians
were conspicuously loyal Ottomans in the days of empire The
ten-million-strong Kurdish minority, while learning to take
pride in a language which had finally been recognized by the
state, was busy expressing its increasingly insistent sense of
nationhood in whatever language the audience would listen to Into the struggle for the soul of modern Turkey a degree of
fairness had finally crept, but social liberalization had on!.
served to highlight the factional currents of ideology running
counter to the ebbing tide of westward national direction.

And so in spite of the government's best efforts, Turkey
has not yet been permitted to belong. The phones ring
ceaselessly, the mini-bars are emptied late at night, the lobbyists
squeeze and cajole those who matter, but Europe observesTurkey's growing pains through suspicious eyes, seeing a
country that walks a geographic, ethnic, and cultural tightrope,
balanced uneasily between two worlds; a bridge between East
and West with a foot in both camps, but with her heart in
neither.
Stalled by the EC, pragmatic Turkey has flaunted her
clubby charms elsewhere. But membership committees have
tended to wince at her applications. Bridges by their very
nature have feet in two camps -- and that's not what leagues,
clubs, and associations are all about.
So Turkey remains only an associate member of the EC.
She is on the Council of Europe but then so is Liechtenstein.
NATO, of which she is a member, is rapidly losing any
coherent sense of its post-Soviet function. She is a member of
the Islamic Conference Organization but since she is the most
avowedly secular state in the Islamic world she is marginalized
by definition. Topless bathing in Pomegranate was never
going to go down a storm in Mecca. She is now considering a
league of her own wherein she will head the Turkic republics
of former Soviet Central Asia. She is a member of the Black
Sea Co-operation Council along with Bulgaria, Romania, and
Russia. All at once, she is looking for companionship to all
four points of the compass. And she probably has a sore
diplomatic neck.

Later that same wintry day in January 1993 I would catch a
news report on the television in my Istanbul hotel room showing the then Turkish Prime Minister at prayer in Mecca, Saudi
Arabia, wearing traditional white holy robes while the then
President (and they change fast), dressed in a pinstripe suit,
was addressing prominent businessmen in Washington. The
Prime Minister, for the rather confusing record, was regarded
as the avowed secularist while the President was the devout
Muslim. The country's two leading political lights seemed to
be dividing their people's cultural affiliations by example.
But I still had to get through immigration. In front of
plywood kiosks long queues had formed, comprised chiefly ofreturning Turks, entrepreneurial Russians, and a few European
journalists dispatched on editors' hunches that Saddam was
about to hit out at his Kurds while the world's attention was
focused upon the Clinton inauguration. On the wall above
passport control Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's bareheaded portrait
was framed in gilt. A man stopped me at customs, gestured
for my passport, and read it at length.

'And what is your business in Turkey?' he asked as one
hand unzipped my holdall and made a cursory journey through
my spare underpants. I was about to answer when his eyes
narrowed in a manner that indicated he had either had a
compelling experience with those pants or discovered something
that was less to his taste. From my holdall, he withdrew
a hat, maroon, tasselled, conical, and made of felt.
'And what is this?' he asked -- the question whose answer
is self-evident of the type beloved by petty schoolmasters.
'My fez,' I replied dutifully. 'I am researching a document
about the history of Turkish hats,' I told him, hiding behind
the low-profile activities of academia.
It was as if I were in Pomegranate again. With this reminder
of the past, I had offended the customs officer. I had questioned
the version of Turkey that held sway at the country's airports
and at resorts such as Pomegranate. And in so doing, I had
buried my own doubts. I was here in search of my own
version, a Turkey that was not so certain that its future was
European and a people who had been hanged less than a
lifetime ago for refusing to relinquish their fezzes.
He gave me a long, cool look, dropped the fez into my
holdall, zipped it up, and returned it to me. 'You are ridiculous,'
he said. 'Welcome to Turkey.'chapter two
'From thee, dear friend, of other days I part,
Ah! Who can speak the anguish of my heart?
My turban! long thou didst these temples bind,
Now, torn from thence, around my soul entwined;' From English traveller and painter Thomas Allom's
rendition of an 1830s protest ode lamenting the
abolition of the turban, as heard in a Constantinople
café.
ON A MORNING made of low skies and skittering pigeons I
shouldered my way up the path above Eyiip. As I climbed, the
wreckage of a view clambered out above the cypresses and the
stunted forest of headstones. An exotic history and a decrepit
present had evidently collided here; an Istanbul winter had
then shunted into the back of what remained.
I turned at the sound of bells. A shepherd was herding his
flock through the cemetery.
`Memleket?' he asked. Country? England, I told him, looking
beyond him to the view. 'What happened here? They say
this was a beautiful place under the Sultans.'
'Sultans.' He spat out the word across the mean flanks of
his sheep.
'Ataturk changed our country. You don't like Ataturk?'
'Of course I like Ataturk,' I replied, bowing to the Turkish
paradox which enshrines the nation's commitment to the
modern in the memory of a man who died fifty-five years ago,
before space travel, before the last war, before even the Beatles.
The image of the great Turkish Gazi, the warrior Ataturk,
still adorns every Turkish coin and banknote and his bust
dominates the country's every town square. His name honoursairports and football stadia, streets and boulevards, dams and
farms, schools and bridges, cultural centres and forests, villages
and ships, lakes and hospitals. Back in the twenties, it was
even proposed that they rename Constantinople not Istanbul,
but Gazi Mustafa Kemal. Admiring the modernizing Father of
the Turks is what you do in Turkey. And if you sense you
have not yet been forgiven for doubting it, you engage
whomsoever you have offended on the subject of his pride and
joy. Sheep in this case.

'Where are you taking them?' I asked, and it was sufficient.
The shepherd winked, ran a surreptitious finger across his
throat as if to preserve his flock in blissful ignorance, and
smiled so that deep crevices in which all suspicions were finally
banished broke out all over his face. 'Last view of Istanbul, my dear hearts,' he told his sheep, took a deep drag on his
cigarette, nodded, and was gone.

The sheep trailed after him, leaving me alone with the
view. The slope fell sharply away below where a jumble of
brambled and broken graves gave way to the road and the
water beyond it. A rim of still scum lacquered the waterline in
a ruff of black flecked with mercury. Beyond it lay a palette of
putrid greens, greys, and browns. Fishing boats lined the
waterfront and occasional freighters lay broken-backed in the
mud, seeping coiled gouts of rust. To the west, where hills
hemmed in the water on all sides, mudbanks shrugged out of
the murk to punctuate the poisoned shallows. Far to the east,
the water eddied into the Bosphorus and lapped at the fringes
of Asia. But I could not see so far, only a succession of bridges
shrouded in mist, whited-out echoes of bridges that bound
Istanbul across her legendary waterways, each like a fainter
impression of Turkey herself spanning land masses, continents,
even beliefs.

I was looking down at the western extent of the fabled
Golden Horn which was known to the Ottomans as the Sweet
Waters of Europe. In the eighteenth century, there were tulip
shows along these banks where the Sultan's guests wanderedthrough the gardens and along the marble quays drinking
sherbet, while candle-bearing tortoises clambered among the
flowerbeds, throwing lumbering flickers of light. Now, there
was a cold, snow-laden wind, and a shepherd driving his sheep
through a graveyard to the butchers, and all those who had
seen the tulips and the tortoises were dust at my feet. I
remembered a line from Pierre Loti: 'In no other country have
I seen so many cemeteries, so many tombs, so many dead.'
Loti, a young French romantic and adventurer, often
returned to this sprawling, hilltop cemetery in the late 1800s
to dream of an Orient that even then was fast disappearing.
The tulips and the tortoises were long gone, and cobwebs
were beginning to ravel up the Ottoman Empire in a cocoon
of decay as the last of the Sultans languished in their palaces
while the great powers collected at the deathbed of the Sick
Man of Europe.

At the top of the hill, Loti's memory had been press
ganged into service at the Pierre Loti Shop, Bazaar, and Café.
Where once he had sat and conjured up quixotic visions, the
modern world had wreaked vulgar revenge until all that
remained of him was now swathed in trinketry.
'Excuse me,' I asked the café owner. 'Can you point me to
Loti's grave?'
'France,' came the reply, the head remaining firmly below
the counter so I was looking down on thinning whorls of scalp
hair scattered with a light dusting of dandruff that resembled
the snowfall threatening outside.

'I see.' My muttered reply probably did not disguise the
fact that I had been expecting directions of a less national
nature. I had always assumed that this romantic orientalist
would have insisted on being buried in his beloved Constantinople.
But by the time of his death in 1923, I reasoned,
Turkey's official rebirth as a secular, Westernized republic was
months away. Loti, who had come here for the allure of
Constantinople's past, for the fabulous Orient, and for veiled,
forbidden, and thus irresistible harem girls, can only have beendisenchanted by Turkey's unswerving march towards the
Europe he had long since rejected. And at the time of his
death; the indifferent embrace of French soil and wretched
thoughts haunting him of another French citizen who had first
come to Constantinople eighty years before him to energize
Imperial commitment to the ideas of the West: Aimee, the
French Sultana, influential mother of Mahmud II, the greatest
reforming Sultan of them all.

I walked through the colourless winter grass and among
the headstones. Some were chipped, cracked, and broken;
others ran green with lichen and brown with rust. Squat stones
arched to a rounded point while minor mausoleums were
ringed with low rusty chain fences, There were delicately
engraved tablets and tall cylindrical steles, topped off sometimes
by stone turbans gathering lichen, but mostly by
Mahmud II's innumerable stone fezzes. They were everywhere,
these fezzes, large and small, some with carved tassles,
some tapering dramatically to the crown. A number of stones
had been decapitated so that the fezzes lay in the mulch at their
feet or had rolled away until the trunk of a cypress tree or
another headstone had finally brought them to rest above the
remains of another.

It all dated from a morning in 1826 when Grand Admiral
Koja Husrev Mehmed Pasha of the Ottoman Imperial Fleet
dressed with unusual care. Having just returned from naval
exercises off Tunis, he was bound for an audience with the
Sultan. He had with him his naval report, but would also
deliver to His Highness an unprompted package containing
some articles he had chanced to pick up in the markets of
Tunis. Word had reached the Grand Admiral that the Sultan
was looking to abolish the turban. Widely known as the
'crown of the Arabs', the turban had strong Islamic and Eastern
associations: its continued use represented a stubborn bulwark
against Mahmud's reform programme, and the Sultan wished
to see it removed.

Mahmud did not greatly care for Muslims, and less so forArabs. His cultural outlook had been actively shaped by his
mother, a French Creole dead some years now who had been
taken by corsairs from a ship off Majorca, dispatched to the
Ottoman authorities in Algiers, and finally presented to Sultan
Abdul Hamid in Constantinople as a glittering prize for his
harem. Mahmud's beloved mother had come from western
North Africa, and the Grand Admiral had high hopes that his
own package from Tunis might find favour with the Sultan --
to his reputation's lasting enhancement.
It was the tradition of the harem that concubines were
chosen not from the Ottoman heartland of the Anatolian
steppes but from outlying provinces such as Circassia and
Bulgaria, and from further afield whenever a corsair captain in
control of his baser instincts and looking to recommend
himself at the highest level happened across a defenceless and
beautiful girl such as Aimee. Officially, it was considered
below a Sultan's status as Allah's vice-regent on earth and
Emperor of all Ottomans to lie with Turkish women. The
more practical reality was the urgent need to encourage
imperial issue. Firing the jaded sexual palettes of overweight
and undersexed sultans was the aim of the exercise, and
experience had proved that exotic foreigners often provided
the spark.

In Abdul Hamid, Aimee ignited a lasting conflagration,
and she soon conceived. But Aimee was different. At the time
of her kidnap, she had just completed eight years in France and
was returning to Martinique an educated and highly Europeanized
young woman. To the reactionary elements in the Ottoman
Imperial Court, she was a cultural time bomb charged
with a high explosive called change.

Aimee raised Mahmud much as she might have raised a
boy in France. He learned French and French ways, ate French
cooking under French chandeliers, and grew up amongst
French furniture. The Janissaries, the powerful and ultraconservative
Imperial Guard, had long understood it to be
their function to guard not the Sultan himself-- especially if heharboured alien notions of progress -- but rather the time
honoured and unalterable institution of the Sultanate as they
understood it. Which made Mahmud a despised giaour or foreigner,
and a threat to the old orthodoxies that had guaranteed
the Janissaries unbridled influence for centuries. Specifically,
here was a man who had already expressed heretic interest in
the three-cornered hat then popular in Europe before it was
pointed out to him that the hat's three points represented the
Christian trinity. On learning this, Mahmud was politician
enough to abandon the three-cornered hat without a murmur.
He might make his subjects less Muslim; he would never make
them Christian.

Mahmud was still pondering the thorny question of his
subjects' headgear when the Grand Admiral returned from
Tunis with the answer. In the package were a number of felt
hats, brimless, red, and tasselled. As they were unpacked
before him, Mahmud recognized them as the compromise
which, with a little persuasion, the influential religious authorities
might be prepared to endorse. And if these fezzes were
not perhaps as Western as he had hoped, they at least would
provide him with a clean break from the burdensome turban.

A revised costume for selected corps of the Ottoman
military was introduced on June 10 1826. It included a prototype
fez. Two days later, guessing only too well what new
hats signalled -- a crash course in Westernization -- the Janissaries
rebelled in support of the old order, but were routed by
forces loyal to Mahmud in a single day. The Sultan put the
word about that the corpses of the slain Janissaries had become
vampires and were lurking in the night-time streets of Constantinople.
As their graves were broken open and stakes
driven through the corpses' hearts by the more impressionable
of his subjects, Mahmud prayed that the forces of reaction
would trouble him no more.
Mahmud was soon to discover, however, that a few stakes
would not still them. His suggestion that the military fez be
fitted with a peak to shield against the sun met with the stonydisapproval of the religious authorities, who countered by
pointing out that such a peak would prevent the wearer from
touching his forehead to the ground at prayer time. In a bid to
press his point, Mahmud ensured that the recalcitrant religious
leaders were directed to seats in the full glare of the sun at the
next Imperial audience, and he kept them there for far longer
than was customary. But mere sunstroke did not dislodge the
religious leadership, and a non-peaked fez was introduced in
1827 -- with a further Islamic accoutrement, the silk tassle, the
single hair by which devout Muslims were effortlessly raised
to Paradise by Allah.

The result was that the Ottoman infantryman went to war
not with a helmet to protect him but with an article of headgear
whose primary design feature was to resemble a prayer mat,
with heavenly emergency exit in the form of a tassle attached.
And since the likelihood was that the prescribed headgear
prevented the soldier from effectively seeing his enemy, pray
he might. There will doubtless have been much frantic squinting
at the enemy during the Ottoman summers on campaign
in the nineteenth century, squinting which continued into the
twentieth century; even at Gallipoli, sunstroke was still
endemic among the Ottoman soldiery.

In the late 1820s, it was decreed that all Ottomans were
now to wear the fez. The people were acquainted with this
headgear, but only in its exclusively ancillary role as a humble
chassis or foundation around which the beloved turban had
long been wound. Originally a kind of covered skullcap
marginally larger than a saucer, it was as if the fez had now
returned after hideous tinkerings, grotesquely enlarged and
uncovered like a surfacing tumour. The Sultan might next
expect them to wear their underpants outside their trousers.
Only a giaour would so treat his subjects.

One summer in the mid-1830s, Thomas Allom came to
Constantinople from England to sketch and write 'while the
brightest skies of the East looked down upon the work of the
painter'. Allom described the abolition of the turban as 'the
3unkindest cut of all, and one which has certainly excited the
unfavourable sentiments of the Mahometans towards their
sovereign in a greater degree than any of his more important
changes'. Allom sketched a café in a quarter of the city 'where
the inhabitants still refuse to regulate their costume by direction
of the Sultan; they refuse to doff the cherished turban, the
"crown of a Mussulman", for the recently introduced fez'. In
the sketch, the turbans of the men defy the infidel Sultan on
every side. A single fez is depicted in the background on a man
whose singular expression indicates that he has obeyed his
Sultan -- and in so doing betrayed both God and tradition --
with the profoundest misgivings. The murmur of Allom's
'protest' ode drifts among the scattered plumes of pungent
Turkish tobacco that frame the sketch.

Such, in spite of Mahmud II, his mother, the routing of the
Janissaries, and even the existence of French furniture, was the
enduring influence of traditional Islam in the nineteenth
century Ottoman Empire. The Empire ruled much of the
Islamic world at that time and led the rest of it by consent.
The Sultan was automatically the Caliph, the undisputed
supreme religious head of all Muslims. The Islamic symbol
itself, the crescent, derives from the legend of a Macedonian
king whose attempts to take Constantinople (then Byzantium)
in 340 BC were thwarted by Hecate, Goddess of the Moon,
when she veiled herself and denied him the required moonlight
for the attack. Even in those distant origins lie two ideas which
continue to stalk contemporary Islam: the enduring threat of,
and the belief in divine protection, from, the Christian West.

I left the cemetery of broken fezzes and walked down into
Eyiip. A narrow maze of overhanging houses enclosed me
where stove pipes emerged through walls and billowed brown
coal smoke over washing which had been hung out to dry one
floor above. Ahead of me, a young man ducked into a small
shack fronted by stacks of fresh marble headstones. I peered
through the grimed windows and watched him hand a piece
of paper to an elderly man who perused it and ran a handacross his white beard. Guessing that the words on the paper
could only mean one thing, I waited respectfully until the
young man left before taking his place in the shop.
'A foreigner,' the elderly man exclaimed on my entrance
and directed me to a stool by the stove.
'You're not too busy?' I asked, inclining my head sympathetically
to indicate the bereaved young man who had just
left.
'Him?' the old man asked. 'He only brought me a quote
for a television. Certainly, we're busy. People are always
dying here. But in Turkey these days people are always buying
cheap televisions as well.'
'He looked a bit sad, though.'
'That's because I didn't like his price. Did somebody die or
have you got a television to sell?'
The stonemason was called Fehmi. I would call him Bey,
the routinely respectful form of address for Turkish men of
any standing. His crisp blue eyes were set in a sea of wrinkles
run amok. He had run the business here, just below Eyiip
cemetery, for fifty years. He was currently working on the
headstone of a young woman who had recently died of
tuberculosis. She would be remembered in the standard
modern style, an engraved garland of tulips picked out in
green and red below the epitaph on a simple marble headstone. 'I used to do bigger, more complicated jobs for the rich but
they don't seem to come here any more,' said Fehmi Bey. I
asked him about the old Ottoman headstones, the turbans and
the fezzes.

'Holy men and often those who had gone on the pilgrimage
to Mecca were accorded the turban on their gravestones while
the fez was for everybody else of any standing -- good Ottoman
Muslims.'
'Everybody?'
'Everybody in the cities anyway, a little less so in the
country. Not women, of course.'
'What did women get?''Flowers; the big slabs of stone with the tulips engraved all
over them. It's harder to carve a veil on a gravestone than a fez
or turban.' Which was true, but did not convincingly explain
the preference for flowers. For while the fez and turban were
pointers to public status, the veil has always functioned as
nothing but a concealment, a negation of the female public
presence. After a life in hiding, what could Ottoman women
have expected from their menfolk but flowers and an inscription
commending them to Allah as the wife of their husband?

'Since we're no longer allowed to wear turbans and fezzes,'
said Fehmi Bey, pouring me a glass of tea from the pot boiling
on the stove, 'everybody gets tulips these days.' The tea came
hot and strong, and the shape of the glass made me mindful of
a connection. Turkish tea glasses, opening with a delicate
curve at the top as if towards the sun, are said to take their
shape from tulips, in which word the origin of the Turkish
word for turban is said to lie. Was the tulip emblem on
gravestones a conscious echo of the banned turban? Did it
remember the defiance of the smoke-wreathed men in the
Allom sketch, a codified expression of a more overtly Islamic
yearning than was tolerated in Turkish life? Was it a kick
against Turkey's march since Mahmud II towards a modern,
godless world? Did even the shape of the Turkish tea glass
mourn the old order?

'We like tulips,' Fehmi Bey replied with a shrug. 'We also
like Ataturk' For the second time that morning, I felt as if I
had caused offence by casting conversational glances towards
the past. But the discomfort was soon dispelled as the first
notes of the muezzin sounded in the cold morning air, and the
stonemason answered a call far more ancient than a reverence
for Ataturk.
'I must go to prayer,' announced Fehmi Bey as he rose
rapidly to his feet, heading for the one Turkish public institution
which has never carried the name of Ataturk. Together,
we walked through the streets of Eyiip to the sounds of old
Turkey -- a whip streaking across a horse's flank, the shrill ofendless voices above the muezzin - colliding with the new distant
pop and the low revs of motor cars. Small grimy
children took my hand and asked for lira. 'Always, always you
say tomorrow,' a young boy with snot plastered black around
his nostrils said in English, pre-empting my answer as he
approached me with his box of shoe polishes and brushes, and
I laughed.
Ranks of men, mostly in unrimmed skull caps or thicker
woolly hats, were gathering at the water fountains in the
mosque courtyard to wash hands, feet, and faces. They had
come to pray at Istanbul's holiest shrine; the mosque at Eyiip
and the area itself take the name of Mohammed's faithful
companion whose mausoleum lies in an annexe to the mosque.
Such was its significance that the Sultans used to come here
upon their succession to receive the Imperial Sword of sovereignty,
the crown of coronation. Pierre Loti wrote in 1876 that
'access to the shrine has always been forbidden to Christians,
for whom even its immediate precincts are none too safe'.
It felt safer by 1993, but even now there could be traced in
the air an attitude deriving from that same exclusive ancestry.
For Fehmi Bey shook my hand in some haste as if to dissociate
himself from me in preparation for Muslim fellowship. Perhaps
he did not feel entirely comfortable standing by the water
fountains with a man who was at once probably Christian,
evidently foreign, and definitely wearing a rucksack.
I stood in a cloud of disturbed pigeons and waited until the
long file of men had removed their shoes and disappeared into
the mosque before removing my own shoes and slipping inside
the shrine-annexe. In the half light I could make out a rail, and
the raised sarcophagus beyond it draped in green. Eyiip
Himself lay there surrounded by candlesticks, old volumes in
alcoves, and Arabic inscriptions on the walls while veiled
women stood swaying before his sarcophagus, arms outstretched
as they murmured devotions. Mindful of the swaying
which occasionally increased to a dangerous degree, I kept to
the back. Eyiip had led Islam's early campaigns against infidel


35

Byzantium and I did not wish to raise the ire of any veiled,
swaying zealot who might wish Eyiip had been more thorough.
Furthermore, early accounts suggest a stone thrown by
an infidel had killed Eyiip, and although other sources concede
he might in fact have died from a quite secular bout of dysentery, there was that certain sense of the old gods staring
down the new beliefs of the foreigners with undisguised
intolerance.
I weaved my way out of the annexe, collected my shoes,
fended off a couple of loitering shoeshiners, and walked
through the litter of brittle leaves towards the Golden Horn.
Thin strips of sunlight were falling over Istanbul but did not
pierce the low cloud above Eyiip's mosques and cemeteries
just as the city itself, engulfing outlying villages on all sides,
had advanced to Eyiip's periphery, and abruptly stopped. It
was as if the predatory maw of development, of shops, tower
blocks, and advertising hoardings had picked at Eyiip and
turned away from a taste too rich even for its indiscriminate
palate.
I was leaving Eyiip's graveyards and dusty cypresses when
a rusty street sign surprised me. It read Feshane Caddesi; I was
on Fez Factory Street. 'Oh, it still stands,' a tailor told me
from the gloom of his shop, what light there was catching on
the array of pins stacked alarmingly between his teeth. 'But they no longer make fezzes there, you know. Fezzes are banned
these days.'
His directions led me to a large square building, squatting
low roofed on its haunches and staring out across the murk of
the Golden Horn. On the waterfront decrepit fishing smacks
were beached. A pair of earthmovers stood in the mud. The
roof of the building gleamed with fresh green paint.
I walked the building's considerable perimeter until I
surprised a man standing in a back doorway, smoking.
'Hello, tourist,' he addressed me in English. 'You want to
see inside?'
When I replied that I spoke Turkish, he looked relievedand impressed, and by way of welcome took me firmly but
mutely by the forearms. His introduction was typical. Many
Turks possess a single line of English which is invariably
buffed by constant use to such a shine that visitors to Turkey
merely assume from the subsequent smiles, nods, and conspicuous
lack of English that their new, evidently fluent friend is
only touchingly shy.
He was called Osman, and was the site foreman, keeping
an eye on the project until work resumed in the spring.
'So they used to make fezzes here?' I asked him.
His dismissive expression, a glance over his shoulder,
graphically painted a past safely out of reach. 'But now,' he
said with enthusiasm, 'it is a modern art museum,' and he
offered to show me round.
The interior was largely finished and comprised white
expanses of space where paintings would soon hang. 'Gallery,'
intoned Osman respectfully, 'conference centre,' or 'store
room,' as we wandered among the old cast-iron pillars made
in Belgium early in the last century, passing random bags of
cement looking like suitably experimental artistic statements,
thoughtfully positioned in emptiness.
Our footsteps fell heavy in the silence. All that remained
was the shell of a building, a lifeless blank prepared for the
display of modern art from which the slightest echo of
Mahmud II's imperial fez factory had been erased. The absent
builders had repaired the roof and the windows, repointed the
walls and relaid the floors, rewired and repainted until the
building was cleansed of its history, the one thing that might
properly be said to belong to it.
'Now, let me show you something more interesting,' said
Osman proudly as he took my arm. 'My office.' Steering me
away from my interest in the past, he took pleasure in telling
me how they had ripped the old fez-making machinery from its
fixings in the floor two years earlier to make way for the wide
white spaces that modern ideas and representations would soon
inhabit. But in attempting to describe progress, he had givenme a link, an imagined glimpse of mouldering machinery, damp
scraps of discarded felt and old threads of tassle, and evocative
images escaped from the grasp of the blank white walls.
I saw how, for the best part of a century, over three
thousand workers had turned out tens of thousands of fezzes a
month here. Fine wool from Spain and Russia was prepared,
spun into balls, and then distributed among the fez-making
women of the city, Turks, Jews, Armenians, and Greeks.
Once knitted, the fezzes were returned to the factory, washed
in soap and cold water, scoured and dried, and clipped and
pressed until the knitted wool was felted. They were then dyed
in large coppers before being stretched over fez-shaped
moulds. Next, they were taken to a drying room and once
dried, loose hairs were removed with the spiky teasel head of
a bullrush and finally clipped for the last time before the tassles
were attached.
Then there had been those intriguings in the dyeing rooms:
the greatest problem that confronted the staff at Eyiip had
been to produce a strong and lasting dye; many of the factory's
early attempts had resulted in a washed-out raspberry pastel
which bestowed disgrace upon the fez makers. Tunisian
experts were drafted in to provide urgent remedy, but their
efforts were in vain. More precisely, their efforts were nonexistent.
Naturally enough, the Tunisians were loath to surrender
the financial and social advantages their knowledge
afforded them, a fact finally recognized when the management
planted a shrewd Armenian chemist disguised as a simple
labourer in the Tunisians' midst. When the Armenian was able
to report not only what the Tunisians were doing - surreptitiously
sabotaging their own process so as to extend as long
as possible their thoroughly enjoyable stay in the Sultan's
employ - but also to describe the precise manner in which they
were doing so, the secret was finally revealed, the Tunisians
dismissed, and the Armenian appointed Head Dyer and
charged with the honour of deciding the exact colour tint ofthe fez that Mahmud II, the Light of the Universe, would
grace by wearing.
Once these teething problems had been resolved, Ottoman
fezzes generally came in a spectrum of strong shades either side
of purple. They could be scarlet, crimson, vermilion, maroon,
cerise, purple, mauve, or red. When I came to ask a friend in
Istanbul to list the Turkish words for these colours, she replied
that the word fezrengi covered the entire spectrum. To the
Turks, all these tones were simply 'fez coloured'.
In the office which Osman had proudly claimed as his own
(the winter absence of the architects and senior foremen had, I
rather suspected, persuaded him to temporarily promote himself
without consultation), a single fez lay alongside a paper
stapler on a bookcase. A chair, desk, and telephone made a
weak fist at filling the rest of the room. Osman steered me
into the chair while he made tea on a small gas stove in the
corner. 1 took the fez in my hands. It reminded me of a flower
pot with a black silk tassle attached at the point where the pot
would drain. I put it on my head.
Osman laughed. 'You are not a modern man,' he told me.
'And you are?' I replied. 'With a name like yours?' Osman
is the Turkish word for Ottoman.
'A name does not matter,' Osman replied. 'I am modern
because I go bareheaded.'
'Even in weather like this?' At the window, occasional
flurries of snow whipped across the building site.
Osman nodded. 'I am a modern Turkish man,' he repeated.
'With modern Turkish problems,' he added ruefully. Osman
earned one and a half million lira a month, the equivalent of
£110. He lived in a small house in the Istanbul quarter of Fatih
where the rent cost him two-thirds of his salary, leaving him
with about £40 to sustain a wife and four children. The biggest
problem, Osman explained, was affording prescriptions when
the children got ill, as invariably they did in the bronchial coal
smoke smogs of Istanbul winters. When the museum wasfinished, Osman would be out of a job, and in the manner of
the Tunisian fez dyers, I imagined him dismantling walls and
digging up floors as fast as he clandestinely could in an attempt
to extend a contract that he could not afford to lose.
'Still,' he insisted, sipping at his tea, lighting another
cigarette, and looking disdainfully at the fez, 'it is still better
than it was under the Sultans. As you foreigners say, the Sick
Man of Europe died.'
'And the Sick Man's hat with him,' I replied.
Later, I walked along the edge of the Golden Horn in the
freezing afternoon. Puddles of ice lay in broken lattice across
the mud. A pair of brown dancing bears stood chained to their
owner, a farouche gypsy character with glaze-dark eyes.
Huddling against a raw wind laden with particles of dust and
snow, they looked as if they would never dance again. A
crippled woman nudged along the pavement on her bottom,
lifting herself with her arms to edge forward. On her hands
she wore a child's wooden clogs as protection against the cold,
rough ground. As I passed, she raised an arm to ask for
money. But it was a clogged hand, a hand she could not cup.
She rapidly withdrew it in an attempt to preserve her dignity,
and the bears looked on with watery eyes.
I looked back and saw, in the shadow of the great mosque where the remains of the Prophet's companion lay, the green
roofed building that since the time of Mahmud II had pointed
towards a Western future. The setting was doubtless designed
to shock. When in 1835 the Sultan ordered the manufacture,
not four hundred yards from Constantinople's holiest shrine,
of radical and Western-oriented fezzes, he was deliberately
confronting Eyiip's old gods with the fact, whether they liked
it or not, that the Empire was now set fair for the West. So it
was appropriate that the artistic heterodoxies of Western
Europe should convey the selfsame inclination from the walls
of the old fez factory one hundred and fifty years later.
I was walking east towards the centre of the city when I
came across huge sections of floating pontoon moored atrandom by the waterside. A tangle of twisted metal infrastructure
like that of a wrecked battleship reared up from the water.
Along the top ran the various sections of a tarmac road which
had collapsed in a rollercoaster swoop. The pieces clearly once
fitted together, but it was impossible to see how. You could
recognize that it once had been a jigsaw puzzle, but only that
much was certain. Among the crushed supporting struts below
the twisted road surface were tables, chairs, old fridges, torn
pieces of wallpaper, broken pipes, old partitions latticed with
oriental curlicues, and lavatories exposed indecently to the air.
Everywhere there was dust and the dung of passing seagulls,
the sound of water slapping indifferently at the pontoons, and
the blackened evidence of fire.
Suddenly, however, I could picture it as it had been, and in
my mind I was able to straighten the struts, right tables and
chairs, return these pontoon sections to their place at the heart
of the city, and fill them with the sound of human life meeting
to eat and drink on the old Galata Bridge. The bridge had
stood at the confluence of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus.
It had by no means been Istanbul's biggest bridge; it had not
spanned the Bosphorus, that wide waterway which divides
continents and so is automatically assumed to demarcate the
two cultures of East and West. Instead, the Galata Bridge had
spanned the Golden Horn. This had caused no great problems
for the structural engineers, but those who crossed it took a
cultural leap into the unknown.
For, rather than the obvious Bosphorus, here was the
dividing line that defined Turkey, the long inlet of water
cutting across the middle of the city's geographical west. To
the south was Stamboul and Beyazit, the old imperial city
where, with its mosques, harems, the tombs of the Sultans,
and the barracks of the Janissaries, one nineteenth-century
writer said there was nothing European save the ground. And
to the north were Pera and Taksim, the original foreigners'
mercantile districts where even today the embassies, the luxury
hotels, and the night clubs can be found.And linking the two was the bridge where Turkey had met
until old age and fire had done for it and it had been towed
away to rust down in this neglected backwater. The country
that was said to bridge East and West had done away with its
premier bridge, had scrapped the very symbol of itself, the
bridge that had known the processions of Sultans and the
funeral cortege of Ataturk above the eating houses of men
who laughed to describe themselves as restaurateurs. This was
ominous indeed, and it didn't take a particularly sophisticated
feel for metaphor to see that.
An unbroken line of traffic stretched across the stark lines
of the new bridge, free of the chaotic life that had colonized
the underbelly of the old one. As I approached I discovered,
with a sense of relief, that a few hardy fishermen had already
made the new bridge their own. One man, casting an expert
line between the passing cars at his back, turned and nodded at
my approach.
'A pity about the old bridge,' I muttered.
He wrapped the fishing line round a railing and dug his
hands into his pockets, looked out across the water to Asia,
and shrugged. 'It got rusty,' he said. I had uncovered a breed
of Turks who worried about rust. After that discovery nothing
could be the same again.chapter three




There was no sign of Ahmet that January morning, a
morning so cold that any sign of him and the warmth of his
car would have been welcome. What light there was reflected
weakly off grey potholes of crushed ice. Refrigerated wind
blew in pulses off the street as if timed to signal the arrival
every half-minute or so of another overnight bus from
Anatolia. They swung into Istanbul's bus station from Trabzon,
Konya, and Amasya, distant cities of the Turkish interior
and the Black Sea coast. Glimpsed faces at the windows stared
out at the blear dawn, and what they saw was concrete,
skittering litter, and unfamiliarity at the beginning of a new
life.
They clambered from the buses, these families, gathered
their shapeless coats around them, and started to unload their
belongings. There were old cardboard boxes bound by string
that once held cartons of soap powder. There were blankets
and rolled-up mattresses. There were suitcases straining with
necessity. There was an ironing board and a small table and an
empty bird cage, and piles of pots with impolite bottoms
seared by cooking.
A thousand people were moving to Istanbul today, just as
a thousand people had done so every day for the last ten years,
turning the city's outlying villages into sprawling suburbs
housing hundreds of thousands. Not long before, I guessed,
the day had come when these families had finally realized that
there was nothing for it but to leave, the cruel, indifferent
processes of economics and history turning the screw tight
until it could no longer be borne. Such was their situation thatthe things which mattered, their friends, perhaps a tree, a
courtyard, or a scrubby hillside, views from a window that
they and their grandparents had known as long as they could
remember, had become sentimental luxuries that they could
no longer afford. Today, economic necessity had defeated a
thousand more Anatolians, and the old life became the past as
they shouldered their ironing boards and empty bird cages and
took the only chance remaining at the jostling margins of the
big city.
Ahmet's parents, newly married, came this same way and
took such a chance in 1946. They left their village and their
families for the city; a common story of the twentieth century.
But they were lucky. Ahmet's father did well, making cakes
and pastries from honey, walnuts, and pistachios. He sold
them to sweet tooths across the city, became rich while dentists
prospered on the teeth he had ruined, and then he grew old.
Now Ahmet was running the family business.
A group of migrants were arguing the price of a cart.
'We could get a truck for that!' a man exclaimed disgustedly
at the price mentioned.
'Where are you from, brother?' replied the carter, hugging
himself repeatedly to keep warm. 'Trabzon? Ordu? You might
get a truck for that price in Ordu. Here, you get this.' And he
pointed to the broken horse standing patiently between the
withers. Carter and migrants stood round making comments
about Ordu and the horse respectively of a desultory, unflattering
kind that hardly seemed designed to lubricate the
negotiations. One of the younger women stood back from the
group. Dressed in a headscarf, she looked over her shoulder at
the departing buses and perhaps only now realized what it had
meant, that last glimpsed view of the village on a winter
afternoon before it disappeared among tucks in the hills.
A car drew up and hooted. When I reached Ahmet, he was
watching the negotiations intently but from the warm cocoon
of a car all his own while he listened to Turkish pop and to
Right Said Fred. He wore an expensive tweed jacket. On the


44

back seat lay a newly savaged carton of two hundred Marlboro.
I asked him how he was, and Ahmet tugged ruefully on
a cigarette. Last night's hangover, it transpired, came courtesy
of Chivas Regal. Twenty-eight-year-old Ahmet lived a European
life on the fringes of geographical Europe. Except that
his car, jacket, and taste in whisky were more expensive, he
was very like me.
'Sandwiches,' said Ahmet, thrusting a packet towards me.
'Rose petal jam.' Only in Ahmet's sandwiches, it seemed,
traces of his past lingered. We gunned our way through the
murky streets. Grimy concrete buildings disappeared in low
cloud around the second floor. Grey figures milled along the
pavements, skirted around tarpaulins where salesmen had
spread their wares - bundles of sheeny-grey socks piled like
catches of fresh fish, a neat stack of paper tissues, a pile of
worry beads shiny like viscera - and spilled across the road in
breaks between the traffic. 'Life is hard,' said Ahmet sententiously.
I nodded, thinking that but for a brave decision by his
parents in their youth, Ahmet might now be a new arrival in
Istanbul standing in the cold arguing the price of a horse and
cart. Or he might be persevering with life in the same
Anatolian village where his grandparents and several uncles'
families still lived -- six hours away if we drove fast. As the
migrants poured in from Anatolia, Ahmet was taking me back
to the world they had forsaken. Sentiment and memory were
luxuries that Ahmet could now afford.
As we crossed the Bosphorus Bridge, coal smoke rose
from countless houses beneath us to be lost in the haze above
a litter of roofs, brown and broken. Minarets gleamed in the
morning, a broken bed of nails above the city. Then the bridge
was behind us and we were in Turkey in Asia; in Anatolia.
Beneath the cigarettes and the music, Ahmet seemed
preoccupied. 'My family, you understand,' he eventually
explained, 'are very poor people. Very simple.' There was
instinctive pride in this, but a stronger, tragically learned element of apology. 'Poor!' As if he feared me to exclaim,'I didn't come here to see poor bloody people, even if they are
your family. Haven't you got any rich friends I can sponge
off, sleep with?' Ahmet looked relieved when I said something
trite about the privilege of meeting them, and my apparent
lack of concern encouraged him to emphasize the point. 'I
mean, really poor,' he insisted.
We climbed gently on to the high Anatolian plateau, flat
and interminable, a kind of underfunded Holland on stilts
where the lorries were always breaking down. Engine guts
and various tools lay scattered round stricken vehicles while
their defeated drivers warmed themselves by roadside fires and
wondered how miracles worked. Low horizons appeared on
all sides with occasional dun hills streaked with old snow.
There were broken fence lines and unnaturally precise stands
of poplars protecting more featureless dun hills from the wind.
Unfinished buildings regularly appeared, as illogically situated
as the poplars.
'What are the buildings for?' I asked.
'Maybe for watching the poplars.' Ahmet was clearly
feeling better.
Poplar Progress Observation Posts, we agreed, abandoned
when it was recognized that poplars do the growing themselves.
Unlike buildings. And so brick or breezeblock constructions
which would never finish their growing stood beside
piles of bricks or breezeblocks topped in snow. Steel rods
protruded from each roof, buildings condemned to know
nothing but neglect, the wind, and the memory of confused
builders' voices.
At the small town of Diizce, where our road caught on and
became unfinished, we left it for a minor one leading into the
mountains. Ahmet was now smoking at a ferocious rate;
something else was worrying him. 'One more thing,' he
eventually said. 'My family. They do not use toilet paper.'
'Toilet paper?' I replied dismissively. 'Toilet paper's for
sissies.' But although we laughed together, you could tell
whose was the laughter that did not ring hollow.'When in Rome' is all right up to a point, and that point is
generally accepted to be well passed when it comes to, say,
headhunting with the natives of Papua New Guinea. Nor, in
my view, does the point extend to smearing one's fresh
droppings over the left hand. Nothing had been more firmly
impressed upon me in my journey through life than the signs
along the way saying Do not touch the kaka, and on this at least
I had been a quick learner. I hid my discomfort with the
thought so successfully, however, that Ahmet's mood was
transformed, changing gear with extravagantly dramatic flourishes
that left his arm hanging in the air with open hand long
after the new gear had been found. I kept thinking he was
releasing doves in the confined space of a small car going fast.
Early that afternoon we reached Karabiik where a great iron
foundry stood against the mountains in dystopic grandeur.
'What does Karabiik mean?' I asked, leafing through the
possibilities in my mind. Anvil? Blacksmith? Forge? Fritz
Lang?
'Blackberry,' replied Ahmet.
One of Ahmet's uncles had come to live in Blackberry ten
years ago. Less intrepid than his brother, he had chosen to
compromise at a dusty little house on a hill an hour and a half
from the village that would always be home. He had found
work as a security guard at the foundry and was not at home.
But his aunt was there, along with a selection of Ahmet's
cousins. Among the younger girls was Emine. She greeted
Ahmet - with his car, his wealth, and the sheen of the big city
- by touching his outstretched hand first with her lips and then
her forehead before rising to kiss his proffered cheeks. Emine,
who was fourteen, had lost her father six months earlier when
he shot himself to escape gambling debts.
We sat wreathed in smoke, drinking tea and discussing
cousin Mustafa's appendix. He had complained of stomach
pains on Tuesday night, been admitted to Blackberry General
the next day, and was operated on the same night. Light snow
was falling on Blackberry and coal smoke from the foundryturned the night sky mocha at the window. Dogs fell silent as
the muezzin started singing from a nearby minaret.
For much of the evening, a black and white television
chirrupping away in the background was affectionately
ignored like a senile senior of the family. But everyone came
to attention with the main news item. One of Turkey's most
highly regarded journalists, known for his democratic and
secular views, had been blown into a hundred pieces by a car
bomb in Ankara one hundred and fifty miles to the south. An
organization called Islamic Jihad was first to claim responsibility.
Emine turned away from the television and the
reminders of loss that it served, hoping that her retreat into
sorrow would not be noticed.
Before we left the next morning, Ahmet distributed money
on the instructions of his father. Distance had not undone the
family bonds, bonds otherwise expressed in the manner that
the family referred to the village where they all had their
origins. They spoke of it not by name but in the possessive,
referring to 'our village' long after they had moved away. It
was a kind of yearning constantly expressed in spite of the
townie haughtiness they had consciously adopted in its place;
people have been taught that big city life confers a respectability,
but village rhythms are not easily unlearned.
Ahmet's evident excitement grew as we drove through a
bright and cloudless morning. I could detect it in the way he
hummed indistinct tunes and changed gear in that elaborate
manner of his. Orchestral conductors could have learned
something from Ahmet.
'Where the Bee Lands,' he said, announcing the name of a
village where the metalled road gave way to track, and broken
ribs of ice straddled the deep tyre tracks. We climbed steadily
through hazel and pine woods, and slalomed our way up
north-facing slopes where ice and snow lay unbroken among
the shadows. That morning, I had noticed Ahmet sling two
shotguns on the back seat.
'So what are we hunting?' I asked him.'Kurds,' he replied.
I knew something of Turkish-Kurdish enmities, and of the
persisting troubles in the south-east of the country. But I did
not know that young men from Istanbul had them in their
sights when they packed their shotguns for a weekend's sport
in the north-west.
'You often shoot Kurds, do you?'
'Oh yes, there are many about in the winter. They take our
chickens.'
Taking chickens struck me as an arcane separatist gesture.
'And you're allowed to shoot them for taking your
chickens?'
'Oh yes. Deer are rare so we don't shoot them.'
'But you shoot Kurds.'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
'I told you!' Ahmet exclaimed in exasperation. 'The chickens!'
And as we followed the rutted track round a corner, the
village finally came into view. But since it was not my village,
I refer to it by its proper name of Sabuncular, or Soapmakers.
Soap has not been made in Soapmakers for as long as the
villagers can remember. So to suggest that Soapmakers has
remained unaltered for five hundred years is not entirely
accurate. Equally, change hardly encapsulates the prevailing
mood in late twentieth-century Soapmakers. While the rest of
the world is being transformed, change meanders into Soap
makers, makes the vaguest of gestures at the future, and then
goes away again. Seasons pass much as they always do; it gets
hot, it gets cold, but the village spring continues to run.
Something did happen in 1962 when the village mosque
was restored by Ahmet's father, flush with new cash when his
cakes went down a storm in distant Istanbul. But since there
were no shops, no school, no police station, just a room in the
mosque building where the village elders gathered to make
their decisions, the restoration of the mosque served only to
reinforce the influence of the past.We drew up in a small yard before the mosque. Below us,
tracks threaded their way between a cluster of some fifteen
houses where smoke rose in orderly plumes. Chickens pecked
between rafts of ice and dogs skulked against stone walls larded
with old snow.
Ahmet's grandparents lived opposite the mosque. We
pushed our way through an old wooden door and found a
man bent double by age, tending to his two donkeys in the
stable on the ground floor. Grandfather was known as Haji
Baba and wore a beard in recognition of the fact that he had
made the haj to Mecca. He wore a brimless woollen cap and
puzzled over my interest in his donkeys.
'Donkeys,' he said simply, frowning as I scratched their
ears. Perhaps, I reflected, I would have been equally puzzled
by his disproportionate interest in my Flymo.
The living quarters were upstairs. Grandmother was tending
to the stove in the middle of the kitchen. On my
appearance, she hugged, kissed, and patted me more like a
lover - and not so long lost - than a friend of her grandson's.
'It's your blue eyes,' Ahmet told me. Eighty-eight-year
old Grandmother had not seen many blue eyes.
She was as hunched as her husband. In fact, one could have
inserted extra floors on every level and neither resident would
have been in the least danger of bumping heads. Like Haji
Baba, Grandmother's face was gnarled, knotted, and lined,
and the colour of old wood, and their eyes were similarly
bright. It was as if in the course of their long lives together the
differences between them had been gradually eroded. The
brightness of their eyes were important for without those spots
of light I would have struggled to locate their faces against the
ancient woodwork of the panelling around them. Whenever I
met their eyes, hers were always smiling and his expressed
something which I took to be a vague fear for the welfare of
his donkeys.
They gave us lunch at ten o'clock in the morning, soup,
bread, and a salad of fresh onions and eggs, wheeling out a


50

wooden table that stood six inches from the floor and making
space for us around it.
'So who is this man?' Haji Baba asked his grandson.
'He's a friend from England, Haji Baba.'
The old man nodded vigorously. 'England, where's that?'
'Europe, Haji Baba.'
'What does he want?' Haji Baba could be a trifle suspicious.
'Nothing. He's here as a guest.'
'Oh, that's good.' Haji Baba thought a moment. 'Does he
need any chickens?'
Haji Baba had once run a farm of six hundred sheep. But
as his sons moved away or found more easeful ways of making
money, the old man sold his land and sheep until all that
remained were his chickens. In the summer, he would take the
donkeys to the higher ground and gather wood for the winter.
In his old age, he had more time for his God, had been to
Mecca three times, and was often to be found reading his
battered copy of the Koran in the light of the window as the
snowmelt dripped off the roof. Haji Baba was the agha, the
head of the village. He was in his eighties now. And for a few
short years, I calculated, he would have been a fez-wearing
Ottoman.
When the muezzin started, Haji Baba hunched off to find
his boots bemoaning the latest village priest's inability to sing
straight. Ahmet grabbed the shotguns and took me hunting. I
was uncomfortable about this, but was enough of a shot to
know I could always make sure I missed any chicken-stealing
Kurd we happened upon.
We walked among young Turkish oaks and pines, trunks
surrounded by scraps of snow. The earth at our feet was a wet
mulch of red-brown earth and pine needles warmed by a weak
sun. The criss-crossed patterns of animal tracks in the remnant
snow indicated dogs, wild pigs, small deer, and rabbit. There
were also bears in these mountains, although Ahmet had never
seen one. At one point he stopped suddenly and gestured me
over. 'Kurd,' he said with authority. But he was pointing at alarge paw mark, and no Kurd has paws. But a hurt, the
Turkish word for a wolf, does. In fact, we did not encounter
so much as a rabbit. Ahmet unleashed his frustrations by
loosing off the two rounds of his shotgun. The echoes
resounded round the hills, returning to us with the distant
noise of alerted dogs and alarmed cattle.
By the time we got back to Soapmakers, night was falling.
In the mosque, the men were finishing prayers. The door was
eventually opened by a small boy with a plastic machine-gun
who sprayed Ahmet, me and a couple of nearby dogs with
imaginary lead. I wondered what he'd been learning for the
last ten minutes. Happily, he took a tumble on the ice in his
attempts to finish us off.
'You just shot yourself in your manhood,' Ahmet told the
boy, helping him to his feet as the congregation emerged.
They were seven elderly men and a much younger, gangly
man who turned out to be the tuneless village priest, or hoja. They mostly wore woollen caps in the style of Haji Baba. One
wore a turban in the wild style once favoured by British
washerwomen. Later, Ahmet told me that its wearer felt safe
from those who might disapprove, but would be unlikely to
wear it on a visit to Blackberry. There was not a fez in sight,
but nor was there a brim. The men of Soapmakers wore hats
designed for prayer. Only the hoja was bare headed. As an
employee of the secular government, he was not expected to
wear anything other than Western hats.
'I prefer,' the hoja would tell me theatrically, 'to wear
nothing.'
In the manner of Emine, Ahmet touched his lips and
forehead to a number of wrinkled hands. Familiar with villager
statuses, he chose the major players and left me to follow his
lead. In the confusion, I ended up bowing and scraping to a
short man with a round face and trouser legs that hardly
reached his shins. A hand on my shoulder alerted me.
'You are honouring the village idiot,' said Ahmet.The village idiot, who had never known anything more
than affection, was now receiving a foreigner's respect. In the
shine of his eyes, I could see that he would not forget me.
The approaching lights of the lurching village dolmush jabbed crazily through the darkness, illuminating stroboscopic
sections of wall, earth, and sky. Dolmush derives from the
word to stuff, most vividly expressive in its frequent use to
describe peppers or vine leaves stuffed with rice. But as I
looked in at faces, limbs, vegetable sacks, and livestock
squashed against the glass in jumbled proximity, I was
reminded of nothing so much as bottled preserves.
As the dolmush came to a halt and the contents piled from
the doors, the natural order in Soapmakers was rapidly
restored. Women who moments before had been crushed out
of necessity against all manner of male anatomy slipped away
into the night, as if to reinstate the demarcation lines between
the genders that should properly exist in Soapmakers, dragging
their vegetables behind them. Meanwhile, the men joined us to
stand in the cold and smoke cigarettes. When we had finished,
Mehmet, another of Ahmet's uncles, led us back to his house.
A stove dominated the front room. The floor was covered
by pieces of random carpet and linoleum. A cuckoo clock was
stopped at two fifteen; the cuckoo had slumped forward lifeless
between its little open shutters amidst a spill of visceral
mechanisms, as if the victim of an irritable sniper. In the corner
stood a small table covered in plastic red-check gingham on
which a solitary plastic salt cellar stood. A postcard from
Istanbul featuring the Bosphorus Bridge was wedged between
the wall and the electricity cabling. As men filed into the room
- the dolmush driver, the hoja, a baker from a neighbouring
village, and a number of farmers - Mehmet lit a pine cone
with his lighter, opened the stove door, and tossed it in.
As young boys ferried back and forth from the kitchen
with bowls of chicken stew, rice, and meat pastries, the
villagers started to talk.'We got electricity twelve years ago.'
'No, it was fifteen.'
'It was two years before Ali got the telephone.'
'But six months ago, we got direct lines. Now, we've got
six telephones in the village.'
'And televisions.'
'And in England,' asked Mehmet, apropos of little, 'what
yield do fields give?'
'I'm afraid I'm not a farmer,' I replied.
But even tourists know about yields, the expression of a
man too polite to say so protested before telling me about
theirs. 'Ours give between seven and ten times depending on
the weather.'
'Good,' I replied lamely.
'I once met some tourists in Istanbul,' said Mehmet. He
had worked there for two summers in the seventies. He opened
a cupboard, removed an object with great care, and handed it
to me.
It was a calendar dated 1976 and featuring pastoral scenes
from Bavaria, complete with statutory lederhosen and foaming
pints of beer in lidded pewter tankards. There were neat stacks
of firewood and light filtering through the linden trees.
Everybody crowded round for a glimpse of this otherworld.
'It is England?'
'If only,' I replied. 'It's Germany.'
'It looks like the village,' said somebody else.
'Except for the mugs,' came another voice.
'And the silly trousers.'
'And the beautiful women.' And everybody laughed. Then
the man in the kalpak walked in.
I noticed his hat before I noticed him, and not only because
I was becoming increasingly hat-obsessive. I had seen such a
hat before, a kind of astrakhan associated with the Turkish
military in the early years of the twentieth century, in a
portrait of Ataturk that often featured on the walls of Turkish
shops and homes. In it, the great man leans forward as if intoa merciless headwind, intent on direction. The picture portrays Ataturk in action during his famous victories at Gallipoli in
1915 and the Independence War four years later. But there is
perhaps more to the picture than martial glorification, for it
struck me that these victories were characterized not so much
by going forward in the manner suggested by Ataturk's
posture but by crucially holding the line. Modern Turkey's
emergence, in military terms anyway, was founded on heroic
defence. So I read the picture's meaning as figurative, a heroic
representation of his political charge against the forces of
reaction, a grim determination to advance whatever the cost.
In the picture, Ataturk is in mud-brown military fatigues, and
he too is wearing a kalpak.
The kalpak reminded me of fading daguerreotypes of the
Young Turk officers who had opposed the Sultan in 1908 and
forced him to concede significant constitutional reforms. Historians
have called the actions of these officers a revolution but
in truth it was little more than a modification, for all these
young men in kalpaks had wanted to do was tinker with a
system that they largely accepted. They could not accept that
the confederation of anarchies that comprised the late nineteenth-century
Ottoman Empire was unsustainable. The
Young Turk position on hats was similarly indecisive. In shape
at least, the kalpak was no more than a tinkering with the
Sultan's hat, the fez. For although the kalpak was made of
black lamb's wool, although it did not sport a tassle and
widened to the top rather than the bottom, it was nevertheless
conical and, most importantly, brimless, identifying the
Young Turks with those who put prayer before practicality.
Mustafa Kemal had been a young officer at the time of the
Young Turk Modification and quickly took to wearing a
kalpak. He was sympathetic to the aims of the Young Turks,
but only in as far as they went. Fifteen years later, he would
embark on a radical transformation of Turkish society that
mocked the Young Turks' notions of revolution, and outlawed
their hat along with the fez. In the mean time, the kalpakprovided him with a stepping-stone, another sartorial caravanserai,
an initial means of breaking free from adherence to the
Ottoman orthodoxies symbolized by the fez. Use of the kalpak
expressed disenchantment with the old system, but moderate
disenchantment, and for a young officer looking for preferment,
the appearance of moderation was all.
The man in the kalpak was called Ali Bey. He had round
mournful eyes, a great stomach for ballast, and a moustache
that continually drooped despite the repeated efforts of his
fingers to twist it into horizontal obedience. A young child
was soon clambering all over him and reaching for something
in the area of Ali's pocket.
'Ali Bey is my uncle,' Ahmet explained, 'and will be agha when my grandfather dies.' Clearly, Haji Baba had sired many
sons. The child eventually emerged from the folds of Ali Bey's
jacket brandishing a pistol. Then he aimed it at me. Ali Bey
slapped him down and apologized. I asked him why he carried
the gun.
He shrugged as if the answer were obvious. 'There are no
police for miles and we don't know what trouble might come
our way. Besides, there are wolves in the winter. You'll hear
them tonight. Leave the gun alone, child. Where's your water
pistol?' The child backed off to gaze enviously at Ali Bey's
holster.
The gun-toting, kalpak-wearing village lieutenant turned
to me. He was fondling a medal which hung from his left lapel
in so manifest a way that my next question was prompted. He
sat back, trying to appear surprised when I asked him about it.
'It's my War of Independence Medal,' he replied. 'Ataturk's
war against the Greeks.'
'But Ali Bey, you look much too young,' I said admiringly,
and since he was referring to a seventy-year-old war I wasn't
simply being polite. Ali Bey, it transpired, was indeed much
too young. The medal had actually been awarded to his wife's
grandfather. But in this village, medals won in distant warsfiltered down through the generations like the ownership of
fields.
The fact that the medal was borrowed did not seem to
trouble the villagers, who gathered reverently for one more
look before Ali Bey insisted on slipping it into his top pocket,
as if he'd been obliged to boast against his modest will. Nor
did it matter to me, for Ali Bey looked every inch one of Ataturk's brave irregulars. He told me that he wore his kalpak
as he was wearing it now, along the head so that it fanned out
at the top when he stood in profile, in the course of his
ordinary working life. On special occasions such as bayrams, or religious holidays, he would wear it across his head like a
bishop's mitre. Then he would buff up his medal and revel in
the glory of 1919 to 1923 when Ataturk and his soldiers carved
a Turkish motherland out of their heroics, even if only because
he had happened to marry a valiant bandolier's granddaughter.
'I am Ataturk's greatest admirer,' Ali Bey told me.
But Ali Bey also told me that he was not a rim-wearer,
unlike Ataturk. Nor, in this alcohol-free village, did he drink
alcohol; Ataturk had drunk raki, the local Pernod with
muscles, to distraction if not to death. Like most of the men in
the village, Ali Bey supported Refah, the Islamic Welfare
Party, and its call for the restitution of the sheriat or code of
Islamic law. He would not brook the notion of the women of
the village voting or even holding political views although
they had been granted the vote in 1934 - by Ataturk. Ali Bey
seemed to revere Ataturk in spite of himself.
But that was the elastic appeal of the Turkish icon. Multiple
distinct incarnations of the man seem to exist in the Turkish
mind, the product perhaps of numerous Ataturk images not
only in the portraits and pictures gracing walls throughout the
land but also in the thousands of statues in town squares from
the borders of Greece in the west to those with Iraq and Iran
in the east. Ataturk has fractured and multiplied until every
aspect of his character and achievement stands alone anddistinct. He has become the pick 'n' mix icon; everything from
the doughty fighter, the national father, the great educator, to
champion of women, of panama hats, and of Western coattails.
As such, every Turkish constituency can find something
in the man of which they approve. It may be imagined that
further manifestations of his personality and achievements will
be manufactured to soak up other constituencies as they
emerge so that if existing versions of Ataturk do not fit to his
world view then the Turk can tailor-make him in other images
until one does. Ataturk in the kalpak was the one that appealed
to Ali Bey, no matter that Ataturk's kalpak period was merely
a piece of politicking, a transitional period on the way to a hatless future free of kalpaks.
Another image, conspicuously popular in government
offices and. in westernized parts of Turkey, depicts Ataturk in
tails, wing collar, and hatless. In this picture, which unsurprisingly
I did not see in Soapmakers, he has considerable poise
and looks like a cross between the Duke of Edinburgh and
Fred Astaire. Of the images in widespread use in Turkey, this
is probably closest to the true spirit of the man. But for Ali
Bey and many of the villagers of Soapmakers, it was Ataturk
at his most unrecognizable. From his reading of the Koran,
Haji Baba had doubtless warned the villagers about the dangers
of bare heads: The wicked man will be dragged down to hell by his
exposed, lying, sinful forelock.
I wondered then how versatile the Ataturk icon could
be. Was the elastic beginning to perish? Ali Bey, who had
fallen with the help of his grandfather-in-law's medal for the
image of the brave Gazi forging a nation by force of arms,
could soon look no closer at Ataturk for fear of the complications
that might rise up to undermine a simple, stirring
image.
Ahmet lit a cigarette and leaned across. 'Refah,' he said
dismissively. 'My uncle is crazy. Uncle,' he shouted. 'Our
visitor wants to know why you vote Refah.'
Ali Bey paused to consider a moment. 'Because Refah willmake our village rich,' he replied. 'Refah will pay for tractors
and farm machinery and new buildings.'
'Dreams, dreams,' murmured Ahmet. 'You know, Uncle,
politicians aren't like that.'
'Tractors,' Ali Bey insisted.
'Tractors,' Ahmet mocked him quietly.
'And they'll tidy things up - stop the fucking on the streets
of Istanbul,' Ali Bey added, warming to his theme.
'Do they really do that?' asked the village idiot, appearing
at the back of the room behind ranks of villagers. 'Can I go
sometime?'
But for once, the Turkish sense of humour was not tickled.
Uncle and nephew stared at each other with a mutual lack of
comprehension. They clearly felt too much love for each other
to be truly at variance, but the differences between their
lifestyles and beliefs was all too apparent. Uncle believed
himself to be Turkish and thus Islamic; Ahmet believed himself
Turkish and thus European. Families have divided over less.
A Turkish journalist called Ugur Mumcu had died in a car
bomb in Ankara the previous day for championing the essentials
of Ahmet's instinctive convictions.
Refah has existed in various guises through the turmoils of
Turkish political life, but at no time has it enjoyed its present
levels of support. Nor has it ever been so effectively organized.
The party receives significant funding from Saudi Arabia, which
it ploughs into communities at grass-roots level to fund the
construction of new schools and hospitals. The Welfare Party
can afford to live up to its name, and deliver promises which
other parties can only hope will be conveniently forgotten.
As the evening grew late, the conversation was steered into
safer waters. The villagers wanted to know where I was next
headed, and hearing my destination was two hours to the east,
imagined me entering another world where none of them had
ever been. The dolmush driver wanted to know about prices in
England.
'Well,' I said, short of conversation and noticing a pile ofdiscarded husks in a corner of the room. 'Pistachios are very
expensive in England.' A whispered command woke a young
boy and sent him scurrying from the room. The foreigner
who could not afford pistachios would take a large bag of
them from Soapmakers the next morning.
Ahmet and I skirted the village dogs which stirred malevolently
at our presence, slipped into Haji Baba's house, and
threw mattresses down as waves of heat blurred off the stove.
'Refah,' murmured Ahmet dozily. 'Bah!'
There was moonlight at the window and, as I fell asleep,
the distant howling of wolves.
I awoke early to a similar sound; Haji Baba was right about
the new hoja's singing. After breakfast, I washed and then
went with misgivings into the lavatory. I looked through the
hole in the floor, looked at my left hand, and promptly left.
Haji Baba found me looking at the old farming gear in his
shed. Strange how little the foreigner knew; only this morning,
Mehmet Bey had told Haji Baba that the Englishman did not
know what yields his fields gave. 'A doven,' he explained
patiently. 'A horse drags it across cut wheat to separate the
ears from the chaff.'
It was a large wooden sled, similar to the one I'd seen on
the wall of Halil Bey's hotel in Pomegranate. But this one was
covered in winter cobwebs, not coated in shiny display varnish.
It would be some time before the dovens of Soapmakers slipped
from the present to serve as a nostalgic reminder of the past.
When the time came to leave, Haji Baba received my kisses
and handed me a plastic bag. Inside was a chicken roughly
plucked. I thanked him as convincingly as I could.
'He always does that,' muttered Ahmet in an attempt to
placate him as we drove away. 'What's a man supposed to do
with a chicken in this day and age?' He glanced at me, irritated.
'Your hair,' he exclaimed. It was damp from a cursory wash
that morning. 'You should have borrowed my hairdryer.'
'It's wonderful, your village,' I told Ahmet in an attempt
to placate him as we bumped along the track.'Your village too,' he replied, 'now that you've been
here.'
After a few hundred yards we drew up opposite the village
cemetery. Ranks of simple stones topped with snow abutted a
ploughed field.
'A fine place to be buried,' I mused.
'Yes,' replied Ahmet. 'I'm almost looking forward to it.'
'But you live in Istanbul.'
'And this is my village. Refah or no Refah.'
I tried to picture how they would one day bring Ahmet
here and lay him down alongside his forebears to return to the
earth where his heart - in spite of his absence - had always
been. But vague recollections of a recipe that somehow
incorporated both chicken and pistachio to spectacular culinary
effect kept nagging at me, and Ahmet's final scene eluded me.chapter four




Ahmet drew up where the Soapmakers track met the road.
Before returning to his cakes in Istanbul, he would see me on
to the first bus to pass.
'Goodbye,' he said as I thanked him and clambered aboard.
'When you arrive,' he instructed me, 'find a hotel that's not
too cheap; you don't want to get robbed. But not too
expensive either. And remember to dry your hair. You'll catch
a cold otherwise. Perhaps you can find a hairdryer there.'
Really. Having just clambered over two goats and a sack of
turnips, I thought to have put myself beyond hairdryers.
One spring day in 1925, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had
summoned his advisers and asked them what was considered
the most fanatical part of Anatolia. After retiring to consult,
they returned to report that the most fanatical part of Anatolia,
exalted Gazi, was generally held to be the town of Kastamonu.
'Good,' said Ataturk. 'Prepare a presidential visit for Kastamonu
later in the year.'
I too was on my way to Kastamonu, a town far from the
tourist routes where dissident Turks had traditionally been
exiled. As the bus passed through a monochrome winter
landscape, I doubted there was another European within a
hundred miles of me. But the pioneering feeling did not last;
intrepid journeys in cold and distant countries are fatally
undermined by hairdryers. 'Watch your cakes,' I muttered to
myself vengefully, resentful of Ahmet's mothering. 'Not too
much flour. They won't rise, you know.'
I soon forgot Ahmet, however, as I began to pay the price
for spurning his grandfather's lavatory. By the time we reachedKastamonu, every single rut and bump of the two-hour
journey was recorded as a distinct and separate tremor upon
the seismograph of my bowels. I subjected the chicken to an
inelegant dash to the nearest hotel.
And when I could concentrate once more on my surroundings,
I saw that I had arrived in a town at the back of nowhere.
I had checked into a hive of cramped rooms fetid with the
transactions of small-town businessmen dreaming of tawdry
mischief. The view from my window was of a breeze-block
wall three feet away, a canvas of grey across which occasional
snowflakes strayed. If I craned my neck, I could see low, dirty
clouds that hung in bloated bags around the town's minarets,
brown slush rising in malevolent arcs from the wheels of
passing vehicles, and snow slithering from warm roofs to
snuggle down the backs of passing collars. The radio buried in
the wall above my bed came on at random, supplying scraps
of Arabesque music before falling silent. Later, I would find
that if I crept up to the radio speaker and shouted at it, I could
get it to sing or provide some weather forecast upon request.
I left the chicken in my room and wandered through town,
along alleys flanked by stalls that were piled high with buckets
and broom heads, screwdrivers and cigarette lighters, ranks of
cabbages and neatly stacked pyramids of carrots, and olives
swimming briny in blue plastic bowls. A forlorn brigade of
condemned chickens and turkeys was being marched into
town. The legs of the birds had been tied so that they slithered
across the dirty ice, looking to charm their way on to a passing
shopping list that their fearful lives might be terminated. What
jealousy the condition of my own chicken, in a warm hotel
room and dead, would doubtless have occasioned amongst
this miserable brood. Was it just me and the local poultry, or
rather a general condition of the place that made everybody
feel uncomfortable on the road to Kastamonu?
Ataturk, evidently, was another who had not enjoyed his
approach to Kastamonu, although the comparison ends there.
For while the poultry hobbled into town leg-tied and I turnedup on public transport dying for the potty, Ataturk had arrived
by cavalcade trailing clouds of glory. Still, for all that he had
been just as uncomfortable. 'Approached the tour with unusual
nervousness,' wrote Ataturk's British biographer, Lord Kinross,
who also made mention of the Gazi's trembling hands.
It was August 30 1925. The Turks had long since routed
the invading armies of the Greeks, and the new Turkish
Republic with boundaries almost exactly as they stand today
had been universally recognized in a series of treaties during
the early 1920s.
Unprecedented change had been quick to follow. Ataturk
abolished the Sultanate - the old Ottoman monarchy - in
1922, and moved Turkey's capital to Ankara where he proclaimed
the founding of the Turkish Republic the following
year. The Caliphate, the four-hundred-year-old embodiment
of the Empire's leadership of the Islamic world, was swept
away in 1924 along with the Ministry of Religious Affairs and
the religious schools and courts that had perpetuated and
underpinned Islamic influence in Turkey for centuries. The
Western calendar and the twenty-four-hour clock were introduced
in 1925. In the following year, a new Western-style civil
code would ban polygamy and much else besides. The Latin
alphabet would be introduced in 1928. Constantinople would
be renamed Istanbul in 1930, women would get the vote in
1934, and the introduction of surnames along with the replacement
of the Islamic Friday holiday by the Christian Sunday
would follow in 1935- Fifteen years of Turkish history from
which was supposed to emerge bare headed, at the other end
of the century, the country through which I was now travelling.
August 30 1925 was the day that Ataturk would first
signal a ban on fezzes.
Throughout the spring of that year, fezzes had bedevilled
the Gazi's dreams. As a military attache and overseas delegate
in the early years of his career, Ataturk had been subjected to
undisguised ridicule for his fez. 'Why do you wear that
ridiculous thing?' a blunt French officer had once asked him.Ataturk's vanity was no doubt wounded, but his primary
objections to the fez were ideological by nature. Just like
Mahmud's intolerance of the turban a century earlier, he
regarded the fez' continued use as symptomatic of a stubborn
adherence among his people to discredited, obsolete, and
reactionary values.
Thomas Allom has recounted how the fez was reviled as a
foreign and Christian innovation on its introduction in the
1820s. But in the hundred-odd years that had since elapsed, it
had been appropriated by traditionalist Turkey and had come
to be associated with a deeply felt conservatism, particularly in
rural Turkey, that held Islamic orthodoxy dear and gazed
askance on the new reforms. The fez largely assumed the
ideological identity of the turban. The abolition of caliphates
and sultanates had provoked widespread reaction, but Ataturk
appreciated that the abolition of the fez was bound to cause an
altogether more intimate sense of offence. Male Turks would
be required to discard an article of headgear which was not
only engrained in daily habit, but which also stood for their
cultural, religious, and personal identity. 'The despotism
which would exert a sway over individual tastes and feelings
is most difficult of endurance,' Thomas Allom had remarked
in the previous century. He was referring to Mahmud's
introduction of the fez at the expense of the turban, but such
are the convoluted processes of history that he might equally
have been referring to its abolition.
In the early 1900s, even for the educated young things of
Constantinople, the advances of European vogue were halted
at the neck. 'I was seized with the ambition,' wrote the writer
Halil Halid in 1903, 'of appearing up to date, and of dressing
in the more modern manner; that is to say, European costume
in all but the fez.' Perhaps a childish prank which he had
played at high school in the last years of the nineteenth century
had served as a reminder. During prayers, when everybody
including his teacher was prostrate, the young man quietly
gathered up his colleagues' fezzes and stacked them on top ofeach other in the middle of" the room. As a punishment, he
was bastinadoed (the favoured punishment of beating the soles
of the victim's feet), which made him lame for several days.
Irfan Orga was a young army officer in Constantinople
when the military were issued with modest peaks on their
uniform fezzes in 1924 as a temperature-testing prelude to
Ataturk's wider campaign against the fez the following year.
But the sight of the peaks caused such invective from passersby
that most of the officers, Orga among them, wore them
back to front to deflect the verbal flak.
Orga was too young to have fought in the Great War
which loomed large in the summer of 1913. They were
collecting precious lira on the streets of Constantinople
throughout that summer to pay the British Vickers yard for
two commissioned battleships, the Sultan Selim the Grim and
the Mytilene, which were to become the pride of the Ottoman
Navy and of a people chronically shamed by the sorry decline
of their Empire. In August 1914, however, fearful of the
Ottomans' developing entente with Germany and Austria,
Britain reneged at the last moment on its commitment to
deliver. Churchill justified the seizure by declaring it vital to
British naval interests. Insult was added to injury when the
British government temporarily confiscated from Vickers the
£5 million downpayment that the Turks had already made, a
payment originating not in some faceless treasury department
but in a million Ottoman pockets, every one of them a heartfelt
contribution towards the restoration of Ottoman pride.
Germany, recognizing a unique opportunity to engender
pro-German sympathies among the Ottomans, immediately
made available the Goeben and the Breslau, two warships of her
own, complete with German crews. They appeared in the
Bosphorus one late summer morning, sleek machines of war
on which the sun shone warm and made them glitter so that
for some time the crews that lined the decks could not properly
be made out. Then, as the crowds looked out over the waters,
a cry went up: 'Fezzes, they are wearing fezzes!' The Germancrews were decked out in the red hats of the Empire. Ottoman
pride was not only restored; it came irresistibly gift wrapped
courtesy of the Germans. That morning was perhaps the point
at which Turkish entry into the war on the side of the Germans
finally became inevitable.
The British meanwhile salted the wound by announcing
that the retained battleships were now to be called the Agincourt and the Erin. The Turkish response was to rename the two
German warships. They would have their Sultan Selim the Grim and their Mytilene despite the dastardly British. Furthermore,
they now proceeded to delay on the crucial commitment they
had made to replace the experienced German crews with less
seamanlike crews of their own. The British then delayed in
returning the £5 million. By the time the Turks had responded
in kind by confiscating British property in Constantinople to
an equivalent amount, Turkey's official entry in the war on
the side of Germany and Austria had become a mere formality.
And the symbolic payload of a shrewdly deployed consignment
of fezzes was doubtless mentioned in German dispatches.
Memories are notoriously short, but in preparing for
Kastamonu, Ataturk knew that they were rarely eleven years
short. So little time had elapsed since 1914, and his file on the
fez would have informed him of the hat's considerable significance
in the Vickers incident. It will also have told him that
Turks had died for the fez in defence of the Turkish ideal as
little as six, five, even four years earlier. Between 1919 and
1922 the Greek army of occupation in Smyrna took to shooting
indiscriminately at fez wearers, including even those Greek
citizens who had become Ottomanized over the years. The
greater number of Greeks, however, formed mobs and
knocked the fezzes from the heads of surrendering Turkish
troops. 'Numerous cases are reported,' wrote the city's British
High Commissioner, 'in which Mussulmans, both men and
women, have been mishandled, insulted, or threatened in the
streets of the town, the fezzes of the former and the veils of
the latter being torn off their heads and trodden on.' A Turkishcolonel who refused to take off his fez and stamp on it was
shot in the head. In Constantinople, the Greeks slung their
own flags between the first-floor windows of the houses so
that passing Turks were forced to brush against them. The fez
was knocked violently from the heads of those that ducked out
of the way. In the file marked fez, Atattirk would have found
every reason to be nervous on the road to Kastamonu.
Furthermore, the popularity of the fez ensured the contempt
in which its cultural counterpart, the Western hat, was
held. A British traveller called Marmaduke Pickthall had
rapidly learned to arm himself with a fez after he was stoned
in the Muslim quarter of Ottoman Beirut in 1895. 'My only
crime,' he wrote, 'had been to wear an ugly English hat.'
By the time of Ataturk's visit to Kastamonu, tentative
moves had already been made against the fez. The radical
head-dress of the army, introduced earlier that summer for
young officers like Irfan Orga, was dismissed by its detractors
as a folding cap akin to that used by skiing instructors in
Switzerland. In July, policemen in Constantinople were surreptitiously
passed orders to 'reprobate and, if necessary, arrest
those conservatives who venture to mock at Turks who appear
in the streets wearing hats'. But these comparatively clandestine
measures had in no way prepared the population for the
wholesale abolition of the fez.
I passed Ottoman houses, beautiful but dilapidated to the
point of sliding downhill, and probably not the original hill
whence they had started out. Catering-size olive oil tins,
hammered flat to cover gaping holes in the woodwork, had
rusted to a fine brown filigree through which the wind blew.
Hunched men staggering under the weight of huge bails
emerged from an old bedestan, a covered courtyard proudly
announcing itself as the Kastamonu Hemp and Ropemakers'
Market. Inside, men were loading the bails on to each other's
backs while a few pigeons huddled on ledges around the
domed and pillared ceiling and a man pissed in the shadows.There had been a law passed against this, the hiring of
porters to carry heavy loads, in 1937. It had been claimed that
to work as a pack animal offended the dignity of the modern
Turk, a nice theory but evidently one which didn't change the
fact that there was work to be done.
'You want a bail?' a burly man shouted at me.
I couldn't think of anything I wanted less. 'I actually want
the museum,' I replied.
'It's crap,' he told me. 'Have a bail instead.'
I eventually found the museum on the main street. It
crouched in a garden full of Roman tombs and broken
amphorae, and it was indeed crap. At twenty yards, it was one
of those places you knew by instinct alone to be crap. It
conveyed no sense of excitement, interest, or civic pride. It
was just another function of government, a place where
paperwork flourished as exhibits paled and died, arms fell off
mannequins, and moths indulged themselves. A sign on the
door, hung more out of habit than expectation, declared the
place open even though the door itself was most definitely
locked. When I knocked loudly, a face appeared at the window
whose startled expression exclaimed: 'Visitor!'
A sceptical key turned in the lock and I was ushered into a
place of gloomy corridors and uncertain doors. A young
woman took my admission money. In return, she removed
four and a half tickets from a docket with exaggerated care and
handed them to me.
'Inflation,' she explained to my puzzled expression. 'You
used to get just one ticket before the admission price started
going up. Now that we have to charge you more, we give
you tickets to the same value.'
'So if I come back next week, will I get four and three
quarters?'
But she was already leading off down the corridor, turning
on lights and unlocking doors as we went.
'You don't get too many visitors,' I observed shrewdly.'We had some school children last Tuesday,' she returned
defensively, and stopped at a pair of old ornate double doors
with a pattern picked out in faded gold leaf.
'This,' she whispered, turning the lock, 'is the Atattirk
room,' And her hushed reverence echoed away down the
empty corridors.
This was what I had come for, the building's moment of
glory sixty-eight years earlier when it still served as the town
hall. Inside, old sepia photographs recording Ataturk's visit to
the town crowded the walls. The Gazi walked amongst
befezzed crowds in a range of exotic costumes. Here he was
dressed in a linen suit and panama; here, he had slipped into
full military uniform with peaked cap. Later, he had found his
way into a grey suit and homburg. He struck various poses,
removing the hat of the moment to hold it by his side, or
lifting it in acknowledgement of the crowds around him. Prior
to the visit, his aides must have wondered why Atattirk had
ordered what amounted to the fancy dress box for a tour of
what was no more than a minor hinterland town. And why
had he tabled so many separate walkabouts? There were only
so many route permutations in a town the size of Kastamonu
before the steppe, which crouched around the town's limits
like wolves salivating beyond the light thrown by the campfire,
swallowed you up in its endless expanses.
For a few hours, as the photographs demonstrated, Kastamonu
had served as Ataturk's catwalk where he previewed a
radical show called the twentieth century. Both designer and
one and only model, he rushed back to the town hall to change
every few minutes before sashaying back down Kastamonu's
main street in yet another of the designs that ushered in
something rich, strange, and - to the people of Kastamonu thoroughly
offensive called radical social change. On that day
in Kastamonu, jaws gaped open that have not closed since. For
the fez was the national hat and here was their leader brazenly
decked out in the reviled uniform of the infidel.
Earlier that year, Atattirk had done what he could toprepare the ground for his campaign against the fez by
wringing from a religious judge a ruling that justified the
wearing of infidel hats. 'If a Muslim buys a cow from a
Christian,' the judge had conceded, 'and the cow refuses to
give milk unless the Muslim milks her while wearing a
Christian hat, then the Muslim may wear such a hat.'
Milk-starved cow owners aside, the ruling was never
destined to transform Turkish attitudes towards Western hats.
For 'Putting on a Western Hat' meant something in 1925,
something not the least bit flattering. An expression in
common currency at the time, it meant betrayal or apostasy
from Islam, or entering the pay of a foreign power, and
probably meant it most fiercely in Kastamonu, a country town
renowned for its entrenched conservatism. Donning a Western
hat in Kastamonu wasn't just inappropriate. It was like wearing
furs to the zoo, or pink to a funeral; it was inexcusable and
outrageous.
Nevertheless, Ataturk brazenly carried the fight to the
citizens of Kastamonu. 'I see a man in front of me,' he declared to the gathered masses, 'wearing a fez on his head and a green
turban wrapped round the fez . . . would a civilized man put
on this preposterous garb and go out to hold himself up to
universal ridicule?' The people of Kastamonu were speechless.
What they did know was that the fez and green turban, which
their Gazi now declared ridiculous, had sufficed for as long as
the oldest of them could remember as a revered badge honouring
those who had made the haj to Mecca.
In 1873, a man called Hamdy Bey had prepared a book for
the Vienna Exhibition called Les Costumes Populaires de la
Turquie. In it, he photographed men and women modelling
typical contemporary costumes, Muslim and Christian, across
the Empire from Constantinople to Beirut, from Sofia to
Baghdad. Its general historical significance apart, the book
uniquely demonstrates the ubiquity of the fez in the nineteenth
century Ottoman Empire. There was the Constantinople
boatman in his fez, the Muslim lady from Baghdad wearing asmall fez bordered with black veloutine, the peasant from
Jerusalem in a tasselled fez with turban wrapped low against
the sun, and the Christian Beiruti wearing his fez turbanless d
la mode Smymiote, or in the classic Smyrna fashion as it was
known. There were city gentlemen wearing maroon fezzes
only the slightest bit conical and so tall as to require regular
pressing; there were the scarlet, tapering fezzes worn by
merchants, and working men's fezzes, often of unstarched felt,
knocked in and with a knob of felt where the tassle might
otherwise have been.
And then there was the Turkish worker from Kastamonu.
Of all Hamdy Bey's many photographed creations, no
costume was so uninspiringly shabby, shapeless, and plain sad
as that worn by the Turkish worker from Kastamonu. All
Hamdy Bey could think to declare in his caption to the
costume, a brown felt smock, heavy leggings, and a fez
flattened under indistinguishable layers of covering, was that it
presumably kept the wearer warm. 'This rather fundamental
outfit does not attempt to stress the qualities of the outer man,'
Hamdy Bey excused it, with all the broad-minded understanding
at his disposal. He then went further in mitigation to
remind his readers that there was no such thing as perfection
anywhere in the world, merely vanity; in Kastamonu, it
seemed, there was neither.
In choosing Kastamonu, Atattirk was deliberately confronting
Turkey at its most reactionary. Mahmud II had
employed a similar tactic in causing his then radically modern
fezzes to be manufactured in the shadow of Constantinople's
most holy Islamic shrine. But there was subtle strategy behind
Ataturk's confrontational stance. He figured that any Kastamonu
hostility to his dress could be dismissively attributed to
fossilized reactionary sentiments - and the rest of Turkey was
not in the least above laughing at the funny old ways of
Kastamonu folk. Conversely, any marked lack of reaction
would allow him to declare that even Kastamonu had welcomed
his sartorial revolution. No other Turkish town, theargument went, would dare to object where Kastamonu had
acquiesced. If the argument held, then Ataturk could not lose.
'Oh no, not at all,' the woman at the museum replied to
my musings. 'We in Kastamonu are well known for our
sympathy to revolutionary and modern ideas. That's why
Ataturk chose Kastamonu.' Her lies were not wilful, but they
were lies nevertheless. Just as boring Germans are convinced
they are amusing, and conventional Brits need to believe they
are eccentric, so even the most reactionary Turks like to think
themselves modern.
By suggesting that Kastamonu was old fashioned, I had
offended the woman at the museum. I decided not to press
my case by calling witnesses such as the brimless woollen caps
that a great many of Kastamonu's men wore. I even decided
against telling her what a hemp dealer had called her museum,
and made my excuses just as she was about to subject me to
the amphorae collection. As I left, I heard the door lock behind
me.
I was returning to my hotel when an old man walked
across the road in front of me wearing a purple, brimless hat,
causing me to jump. More domed than conical and without a
tassle, it was not the classic fez, but I suspected it to be a very
close relation. It reminded me of Hamdy Bey's working man's
fez. I began to track it, my heart beating rapidly, stopping to
feign interest in a particular lamppost whenever the fez wearer
greeted friends, or examining an apple at close quarters whenever
he shot the breeze with stall holders further down the
market. He crossed another road with me in surreptitious
pursuit and started to describe a large circle until we passed the
apple stall again. Gradually, it became clear to me that the old
man was going nowhere in particular.
When we passed the apples for the third time, I fell back to
talk to the stallholder.
'Why does that old man keep going round in circles?'
'He's bonkers. He does this every day. And why do you
keep looking at my apples?'I decided I had better buy some.
'I thought it was illegal to wear a fez these days,' I said,
pointing at the old man as he disappeared between a pair of
donkeys.
'He's not wearing a fez,' said the stallholder. But he seemed
to say it instinctively, even before he had looked up. 'It is
illegal. But, as I said, he's mad, probably doesn't know what
he's wearing on his head. It's actually more like a beret. You
owe me for the apples.'
I handed over a couple of notes and wandered away. It
hadn't looked like a beret to me. Perhaps I was reckoning on
too much historical aptness, finding a fez wearer in this
nondescript, reactionary town whose inhabitants Atattirk had
considered the hardest fez-wearing nut to crack. Perhaps all I
had in fact found was a circular lunatic in a meaningless red
hat. 'Stop!' a man's voice shouted at my back and I turned
expecting to be confronted by an Islamic mullah outraged by
the infidel in his midst. But there was only a young man
sashaying across the street continuing his poor English pop
rendition. 'In the name of low, before you break my heart.'
Perhaps I was wrong; perhaps it had only been a beret.
That night, I sat among ranks of Turkish men in the lobby
of my hotel, watching the coverage of demonstrations
throughout Turkey against the murder of Ugur Mumcu on
the television. There were protests in Istanbul and Izmir, in
the Mediterranean cities of Mersin and Adana, and in Ankara,
the city where Mumcu had worked and died. Some ten
thousand people attended the march in Istanbul. As they passed
the Iranian Consulate, they shouted: 'Here is the sheriat. Here
are the murderers. Islamic fundamentalists back to Iran.' In
Ankara, more than fifteen thousand people marched from the
place of Mumcu's death outside his house where they laid
flowers, to the city centre offices of his newspaper, Cumhuriyet. Candlelit vigils were held outside his house. Footage showed
the journalist's desk at Cumhuriyet spilling over with red
carnations.Cumhuriyet (the Republic) is a left-leaning and highly
respected newspaper which supports the basic principles of
secular republicanism on which Ataturk's state was founded.
Like the editors-in-chief of two other Turkish dailies, The State and Freedom, who were assassinated in 1979 and 1990 respectively,
Mumcu and his newspaper represented an emerging
democratic consensus. For the first time, the potential influence
of voices such as Mumcu's within the framework of an
increasingly free press was being recognized by elements
accustomed to a blinkered and unadventurous media, one
which had traditionally turned a blind eye to their malevolent
and marginalized activities, or at worst churned out unsubstantiated
and unconvincing propaganda in a vain effort to discredit
them. Mumcu was widely read and respected, and in the
struggle for the soul of modern Turkey his voice was perhaps
too persuasive for his opponents to permit.
It was hard to imagine a journalist dying in similar circumstances
in Europe, and harder still to envisage a comparable
popular reaction. An upwelling of outrage had greeted Mumcu's
murder. In Sile, near Istanbul, a mob armed with staves
and stones attacked the local Refah party offices. But then I
thought of Ali Bey in Soapmakers, and millions of convinced
Refah men like him, and wondered what they would have
made of Mumcu's murder. There had been no demonstration
on Mumcu's behalf in Kastamonu.
I went up to bed. And as I dozed, I thought of Ataturk
tearing through his wardrobe one hot summer's day sixty
eight years ago in this small town where he had come to unveil
his vision of the modern Turk. I thought of those ranks of
gaping mouths as the people of Kastamonu tried to absorb the
deviant future tabled for their country. But after Mumcu's
assassination in Ankara, the very heart of the secular republic,
that future did not seem so certain.
And nor did my own when the radio burst into life and,
despite repeated thumps and bellows, kept going all night.chapter five




The next morning, even before opening my eyes, I knew
it was snowing heavily. The distinctive muffling which is the
effect of snowfall gave it away, bluntening the edge of every
street noise so that passing lorries seemed distant and unearthly
at my window. Besides, the radio that would not be silenced
had reported it on weather bulletins every half-hour throughout
the night.
There was no time to lose. To reach the coast, I had to
cross the mountains to the north before the snow boxed me
into Kastamonu. I found myself tip-toeing out of the door,
abandoning the chicken to chance and the radio to talk on
through the morning. I experienced a strange kind of guilt,
like slipping away from the bedside of a stricken but impossibly
garrulous old relative.
The bus wound through snowscape into white-shrouded
pine forests. As we passed through villages, the smell of coal
smoke invaded the bus. Slabs of snow had slid from the stove
warmed roofs to disintegrate in heaps of white powder on
brown-trudged and pot-holed pavements. Hunched figures
were shovelling it on to the road only for the snow plough to
redeposit it on their doorsteps minutes later. Where others
might have considered this irksome in the extreme, the villagers
seemed genuinely grateful for the diversion. Even the
sallow visages of the men could be seen to gather with what
for them passed as definite eagerness at the smoky windows of
the kiraathanesis or gaming halls to observe the passing of the
snow plough before returning to their backgammon boardswith a finality which suggested that nothing but an obscure
memory of home would now disturb them till spring.
Personally, I could not wait that long. And as we began to
descend the mountain, and the wheels which had previously
slalomed free-style across patches of ice now found grip on the
first brown patches of purest tread, I was thankful to be
reminded that winter was not in fact a permanence. The first
licks of grass and occasional apple trees, gnarled, knobby, but
finally uncloaked of snow, lifted my spirits and, by the time
we were corkscrewing towards sea level, only the faintest
ridges of white still clung to the landscape's chill contours or
dusted the tree trunks of the orchards. We followed a brown
river past dilapidated buildings into the town of Inebolu.
A wind was blowing bitter off the Black Sea. Seagulls
huddled like frozen vagrants above the spill of waves where
the river met the sea, its bunched energy diffused among the
long swells. Tractors were parked around the petrol station on
the seafront, a long strip of concrete where the spray flew and
a shoal of salt drops, icy cold, smattered my face. But they
made me feel alive and the sunlight, however weak, turned the
breakers jade and brilliant white and filled the sky. Modern
buildings, grey and functional, dominated the seafront but I
saw instead the few relics of Ottoman architecture among
them, once exquisite houses fronted with salt-crumbled yellow
plaster, dark wooden window frames, and filigree iron balconies
below scrolled beams and high, sloping roofs.
The hotel was housed, of course, in one of the modern
buildings but although the sunchairs outside were stacked
now, they redeemed the place, lending it a welcome connection
with summer. I stepped into a lobby which was bathed in
sunlight and filled with recuperating pot plants. An elderly,
owlish man rose to shake my hand and gestured me to a seat
while he finished a conversation on the telephone. He was
planning a trip to Batum in Georgia, eight hundred miles away
at the eastern end of the Black Sea. The door to the lobby waspatterned with stickers advertising tour operators in Hamburg
and Munich, Amsterdam and Vienna. Under the glass-topped
desk, holiday snaps showed the man in affectionate clasps with
blond Europeans; young, summer-pink people who had found
themselves a friendly Turkish hotelier.
Erdogan Karagoz put the phone down and regarded me
over his glasses. 'Well, well,' he said in the helpfully distinct
Turkish of a man clearly accustomed to foreigners. 'Where did
you spring from?'
'From Kastamonu,' I replied. 'Looking for hats.'
'Hats, eh? Well, we in Inebolu don't wear many hats any
more. We're modern here.' And for once I was not tempted to
dismiss the Turkish refrain out of hand.
'There is very little work left for the eight thousand people
who live here now,' explained Erdogan Bey. 'Many of us have
been forced to seek work in Istanbul, and have spent long
periods of time there. Our mentality is big-city.'
'Unlike Kastamonu?'
'Exactly,' he replied. 'There is enough work in Kastamonu
to prevent people ever leaving. So they rarely do. The mentality
is closed to the outside world.'
So the inward-looking people of Kastamonu worked shops
in the shadows of their mosques and small acreages on the
Anatolian plateau while the population of Inebolu remembered
a past when sailors from Russia and Europe had come ashore
here, maritime itinerants leaving the stamp of the wider world
long after the freighters had slipped from their moorings and
borne them away. In 1880, there had been a large Greek
population, steamboat agencies, a customs house, and even a
number of consulates in Inebolu. Inebolu had grown up facing
the sea and despite the fact that the steamboats and the
consulates were long gone the town seemed to keep a weather
eye on the horizon. For the horizon was where the travel
agencies of Hamburg and Batum's business proposals came
from. The horizon was the future, and over the horizon, the
sail of opportunity might one day reappear.When Erdogan Bey was a child, five boats a day used to
call at Inebolu. The town flourished on the export to Istanbul
and Europe of Black Sea coastal produce such as eggs, apples,
and chestnuts. The arduous mountains of northern Turkey's
interior had long safeguarded the ancient trade route by water
through the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, and guaranteed
Inebolu's continued significance. And so it was until they built
what the Turks call the 'black way', or the tarmac road. It
skirted the mountains well to the south of Inebolu to link
Istanbul and Ankara with Samsun a hundred miles further east.
Most of the freight was transported overland and Inebolu
suddenly became redundant. The agencies closed and the
consuls were recalled, and thirty years ago the boats finally
ceased calling. Now the summer ferry service carrying tourists
and freight between Istanbul, Samsun, and Trabzon did not
even heave into view as it passed Inebolu miles out to sea.
Erdogan Bey stubbed out a cigarette. 'Barring Natashas, I
do not think the hotel will attract another guest this January
day,' he said, winking mysteriously. 'Let me show you
around.' He put on his coat and ushered me to the door.
'Look at this,' he said as we passed the tourist information
office.
Through the broken, cob webbed window, I could see a
cracked windsurfer and a punctured paddling pool awash in
slimy green water.
'Not much, eh? Not much. And yet' - his voice rose like
an epiphany as we walked along the seafront - 'there was a
time.' We were now standing by an old wooden longboat,
painted red and yellow, in which lay the constituent parts of
an old ox-cart. 'You know what happened in May 1919?'
Erdogan Bey asked me.
I nodded. 'I celebrated it once in Pomegranate,' I replied.
And Erdogan Bey reminded me how the Allies had proposed
the post-war dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. How
they were sympathetic to various claims to large sections of
Asia Minor since, chiefly speaking, the claims were their own.And how that would have meant Turkey reduced to a swath
of northern Asia Minor, including Inebolu.
Meanwhile, the Greeks tried to impose their own Pan
Hellenic version of the settlement upon the beleaguered Turks
by landing at Smyrna and pushing deep into the Anatolian
hinterland, taking out fezzes as they went. It was at this nadir
in Turkish fortunes that a minor Anatolian sideshow redirected
the course of history.
Rising tensions between the Greek and Turkish populations
around Samsun and Inebolu had led the compliant government
of the Sultan in Constantinople to propose that an inspectorate
be dispatched to restore order and to suppress Turkish nationalists
active in the area. Mustafa Kemal, who had kept his
nationalist inclinations firmly under his fez - he still wore it
when realpolitik deemed it necessary - and whose war record
was beyond reproach, was chosen with the connivance of well
placed nationalist elements in Constantinople to lead the
inspectorate. Mustafa Kemal, needless to say, had an unpublicized
Anatolian agenda of his own.
The Bandirma, the steamer that was to carry Mustafa Kemal
to his new post on the Black Sea coast, left Constantinople on the night of May 16 1919 and moored off Samsun on May 19,
ensuring an annual public holiday in perpetuity.
'But what is interesting,' said Erdogan Bey, 'is that Ataturk
landed at Inebolu en route.'
'Not in the history books, he didn't,' I told him.
'History books!' he exclaimed. 'We're outside history
books now. Nobody knew about it. Ataturk was supposed to
be headed straight to Samsun to deal with Turkish attacks on
the Greeks. Instead, I tell you, he stopped at Inebolu. There
are old men in town who even think they saw him.'
Interestingly enough, Erdogan Bey pointed out, it should
not take a steamer much more than twenty-four hours to reach
Samsun from Istanbul. It had taken Mustafa Kemal sixty.
What had kept him?
In the months that followed, the fledgeling nationalistforces would rally to Mustafa Kemal, who quickly proved
himself a better resistance leader than inspector. Clandestinely
armed and equipped by sympathetic elements in Constantinople
and later by the Soviet Bolsheviks, the Nationalists would
gradually grow strong enough to discourage Italian and French
claims on Southern Anatolia, to rout the invading Greeks, to
dissuade the British out of Constantinople, and to build an
irresistible case for the Turkish nation. Their munitions mostly
came ashore at Inebolu.
The port was perfect for the purpose; beyond the reach of
the enemy, inaccessible by land, and small enough for illicit
landings to go unnoticed. It is unlikely that Mustafa Kemal, a
campaign veteran of Gallipoli, would not have been thinking
ahead during those hours in May 1919, hours that have never
been accounted for. He would have been quick to appreciate that
they might land weapons at Inebolu unnoticed, and so stepped
ashore to sound out reaction to his yet vague idea that this port
might become the engine-room of the Independence struggle.
'And the result was this,' said Erdogan Bey, patting the red
and yellow boat which had once brought the munitions ashore
before the oxen carted them up the mountain road I had come
down only that morning.
A bust of Atattirk stood in the town square above a pair of
bas-reliefs. One depicted the night-time unloading of armaments,
the other Atattirk resplendent in a panama hat.
'You mentioned hats,' exclaimed Erdogan Bey. 'This other
visit of Atattirk to Inebolu you will certainly find in the history
books.' And he took me to visit Mustafa Bey, with whom he
had been at school in the days when five boats called.
Mustafa Bey was Inebolu's Director of Higher Education.
He worked in one of the beautiful seafront buildings near the
hotel. He presided over a neat desk, his few strands of hair
pomaded back from his forehead above a precise pinstripe suit.
'I have some Georgian business to look after,' said Erdogan
Bey, excusing himself. 'Mustafa Bey will look after you.'
'Let me show you our little museum,' said Mustafa Bey.'And then we will drink tea and smoke cigarettes, and talk a
little.'
We descended several flights of stairs and entered a large
room overlooking the sea. On the panelled walls were fading
photographs of Atattirk, and strips of dirty wallpaper that
flapped languidly like underwater seaweed when Mustafa Bey
opened the window to the breeze. At one end of the room
stood a makeshift stage. The wooden steps that approached it
were festooned with old crepe paper, yellow and sagging.
'We had a silly fashion show here some months ago,'
Mustafa Bey explained. 'One day,' he sighed, 'I would like
this to be a proper museum, with new carpets and without
silly fashion shows.'
We were standing in the room where Atattirk had come,
after the rigours of reactionary Kastamonu, to administer the coup de grace to the fez. He had chosen with care this place
where only six years earlier the men, women, and children
had shouldered his munitions for him, had carried across the
mountains shells half their own body weight. The people of Inebolu, who had given so much, would continue to buoy
him with their support. As he approached Inebolu, the townsfolk
showered him with late summer flowers, and he turned
towards the sea light, the space, and the infinite horizon,
remembering an unsung visit only six springs earlier, when all
this had been a dream barely imagined.
The people of Inebolu sacrificed sheep, offered up the fruit
of the harvest, and kissed their Gazi's outstretched hand as he
passed. The boatmen displayed their skills of seamanship
among the breakers and children sang Republican songs.
Finally, he made his way to the room where Mustafa Bey had
brought me, turned to the packed throng in front of him, and
began to speak. 'The people of the Turkish Republic, who
claim to be civilized,' he told them, 'must prove that they are
civilized by the way they appear.' And that, he explained,
meant boots and shoes, trousers, shirt and tie, jacket and
waistcoat. 'And to complete these, a cover with a brim on ourheads. I want to make this clear. This headcovering is called
"hat"
The men of Inebolu went on to the streets and discarded
their fezzes. The women, the first outside the big cities
reported to have done so, went further still by throwing back
their veils and presenting their wan, unsunned faces to Atattirk
in the street. A photograph in the room caught my eye. The
Gazi is walking an Inebolu street amongst a throng of people.
He is wearing a linen suit and a panama. He is also wearing a
victorious smile, as if he knows he is amongst friends loyal to
the point of excusing his extraordinary clothes. But he has just
passed two local soldiers. Since the modern military headgear
has not yet been issued in this remote part of the country, they
are dressed in fezzes. In the photograph, they remain at
attention but the Gazi has passed them and behind his back,
their eyes at least are at ease to express astonishment. For the
moment of the photograph, the soldiers are wide-eyed witnesses
to a radically transformed world.
'And so,' Mustafa Bey murmured, looking at his watch as
he led me upstairs for a glass of tea, 'the Turkish nation entered
the modern world.'
By the time we reached his office, I wondered whether it
had been irony I'd heard in his tone. For the first lesson of the
day in the classroom next door comprised rows of young
women hunched over antique sewing machines. Their heads
were mostly shawled. An apprentice clatter filled the air as
trial stitches patterned old cloth, and heads remained studiously
bowed as we passed. For we were men, and for a moment it
was as if Atattirk had never come here in 1925, and that all the
monumental changes had only led back to this room by the
Black Sea where a class of girls were learning the old skills as
their mothers and grandmothers had done.
Mustafa Bey ladled sugar cubes into a slender-waisted glass
of tea and smiled. 'I know what you are thinking. If I had
known you were coming, I might have put these girls in a
back room and organized an English lesson to impress theforeigner. But what would these girls do with their English?
We are poor, and there is little work enough for the men let
alone the women. Nobody pays any taxes. So we have learned
to enjoy talk and tea. We have learned to entertain our visitors.
Since there are some fifty gaming houses in Inebolu to support
an adult male population of under three thousand, it goes
without saying that we have also learned to entertain ourselves.'
Like the men of the mountain villages whiling away
an odd six months with chat and backgammon, cigarettes and
tea, I thought, and wondered whether all this was in some
way connected to the fact that 'Ottoman' had come to mean a
comfortable couch in English, and whether it was also a
coincidence that divan, another kind of couch, was also the
Turkish word for the Ottoman ruling council - on which,
incidentally, women had never sat.
In the classroom, the shawl-wearing women were learning
not only sewing but their place. Ataturk's exhortations to the
women of Inebolu in the autumn of 1925 were followed a year
later in Trabzon, at the eastern end of the Black Sea, by a
proclamation from the governor which forbade women to
wear the veil. 'The veil,' it announced, 'deprives women of
the possibility of earning their livelihood, the custom is well
known to be insanitary, and it tends to hinder the work of the
police by enabling criminals to conceal their identity. After ten
days any women wearing a veil will be arrested.' But not even
the possibility that they were aiding and abetting the local
criminal fraternity, nor allegations that they were prevented
from keeping themselves clean, persuaded the majority of
Trabzon's women to unveil.
Besides, the police had quite enough of their own problems
without wondering whether a veiled woman was in fact a
concealed criminal, and whether to arrest the subject on either
count. For a 1925 order had forbidden the country's policemen
to wear the beard, in spite of the fact that only three years
earlier the young caliph, Abdul Mejid, was attracting censurefor not growing a beard, long regarded as an essential Islamic
accoutrement.
Into these confusions sallied the Constantinople correspondent
for the London Times, who set out along the Black Sea
coast in 1926 to take the country's social and cultural temperature.
He took a ferry of the Lloyd Triestino line, stopping at
Inebolu as one did in those days before continuing on to
Samsun, Giresun, and Trabzon. In Giresun, the correspondent
happened across the performance of a group of strolling players
sponsored by the regime to propagate the idea that women
should be encouraged to work. A strongly worded proclamation
ensured a healthy turn-out of local women. But such was
their outrage on discovering that they were expected to sit
alongside the men, and at the unabashedly radical content of
the performance, that the women left in an incensed body at
the end of the first act. 'The forces of reaction,' commented
the correspondent, 'cannot be ignored.'
In 1935, the ruling party congress discussed nationwide
legislation banning the use of the veil in Turkey, but eventually
deemed it to be unnecessary since the rising generation were
apparently discarding it of their own free will. Later, legislation
was passed to outlaw the use of veils, shawls, or headscarfs in
educational institutions but otherwise the female headcovering
was left to gravitate towards its own demise.
Its demise, however, has proved a protracted one. In 1968,
a female student of Ankara University's theology department
queried the ban. Why should women not dress as they wished
in educational establishments? By November 1988, sympathetic
Islamic elements in Parliament had become sufficiently
influential to cause the headscarf to be unbanned. But the
President, true to his Kemalist beliefs, immediately lodged a
veto (which Parliament ignored), and applied to the Constitutional
Court for clarification. In March 1989, the ban was
reimposed. There were protests that week all over Turkey.
The secular President was accused by chanting crowds of beinghand-in-hand with Salman Rushdie. Outside the mosques in
Ankara, crowds chanted: 'Break the hands that wish to remove
headscarves.' Crowds of women walked through Istanbul in
silent protest. Eventually, the final decision on headscarf
wearing was left to individual universities. But since the
legislation was no longer enshrined in the constitution, this
was regarded as a victory for the traditionalists. In early 1990,
a Kemalist professor and lawyer called Muammer Aksoy was
drafting an appeal to reverse the legislation when he was
gunned down one January evening at the entrance to his
Ankara home by an unknown group calling itself Islamic
Revenge. Headgear in Turkey had claimed another life.
'Nobody knows what will happen next in Turkey. It's a
shadowy situation,' as the Financial Times in London quoted a
respected Turkish columnist. His name was Ugur Mumcu.
And so it was in Inebolu, the town where they had first
discarded the veil, that ranks of shawled heads were bent over
sewing machines, and in the sound of stitches in their thousands
could be heard the enduring seams that bound Turkey
to the past. It all made Mustafa Bey pensive. For him, change
had only served to highlight what he regarded as Turkey's
enduring backwardness. I cheered him a little by offering him
an expensive Marlboro and reminding him of the improvements
they were making in Inebolu. There was the upgraded
road along the coast to Samsun, and the new port terminal at
Doganyurt twenty miles west, as well as the plans to improve
Inebolu's own port facilities that summer. There was the fact
that, true to their republican tradition, the majority of Inebolu's
electorate had recently voted for True Path, the centrist,
secular party. And then there were the town's beautiful
wooden Ottoman houses, three hundred and fifty of which
were now protected by law, to take pride in.
'I suppose you're right,' said Mustafa Bey. 'And there's
always people like Erdogan doing business with Georgia,
which can only help the town.' I asked Mustafa Bey what his
friend's business in Georgia was, and he told me it was snails.'There is only one thing,' Erdogan Bey told me later in his
car, 'that snails like better than the lush mountain pastures
above the Black Sea coast of Turkey. And that's the mountain
pastures above the Black Sea coast of Georgia. You will see
the shells of Turkish snails at the factory; imagine something a
little bit bigger and you have a Georgian snail. A Georgian
snail is hard to beat. Georgian currency, however, is easy to
beat. In Georgia, God help them, they think of the Turkish
lira as we think of the dollar.' The Turkish lira had struck me
as the currency equivalent of skydiving, but to the poor
Georgians that was stability beyond their dreams.
The villagers collected the snails in the spring among long
grass and around the feet of trees and brought them down to
sell at the factory in Inebolu where they were removed from
their shells, packed in ice, and dispatched by truck to Paris
where they would be defrosted, allotted temporary housing of
their own, doused in garlic, and served.
There were no snails now, only trays of last spring's
abandoned shells littering the building. In that it consisted of a
table where the shells were removed and the snails bagged, a
very large fridge, and a wall chart featuring different snail
types, it was a very Turkish kind of factory, one that elsewhere
might have been called a packing shed. The proud owner
showed me round in three minutes. I timed it. Then he
shrugged and said, 'That's all there is to it, really,' and I left
them to talk, a group of men huddled round a gas stove
waiting for the long, long grass of spring.
As I wandered through the town in the gloaming, I heard
from somewhere the oddest sound. It reminded me of a
distinctive brand of 1960s film soundtrack, a refrain plangent,
mournful and French, Pigalle lamplit and in the rain - but
played on a glockenspiel so that it actually sounded more than
anything like a lovesick ice-cream van. When the origins of the
sound have into view, I saw that it was indeed a van but one
whose song was advertising not ice-creams but gas canisters
brand-named Aygaz. In the cold, they were selling fast.In time, the Aygaz refrain would be imprinted upon my
memory, the signature tune of the Turkish winter. But for
now, my attention was attracted to a plume of smoke rising
purple above the town. Word had spread and people forgot
their Aygaz canisters as they spilled on to the streets and
moved to spectate at an unfolding tragedy.
High on a hill stood one of Inebolu's three hundred and
fifty beautiful houses. It was clapboard, painted a terracotta
red, exquisitely scrolled and carved, topped by ancient wooden
tiles, standing in a beautiful winter orchard, and it was on fire.
The fire brigade had arrived. A single hose threw up a lazy
jet of water that in its indolence indicated it knew its efforts to
be futile. The flames were sating their ravenous hunger from
within and could not be reached. A gathering crowd stood
transfixed, for there was much to see. You could watch sections
of clapboard gradually glow, change colour, and incandesce, or
notice the lazy way that sections of wall and roof seemed to
soften seconds before collapsing. You could listen to windowpanes
explode or watch the next-door neighbour, fearful of
sparks, play his well-rehearsed hose across the equally beautiful
yellow exterior of his own wooden home. You could add your
throwing arm to the hopeless gesture of others and fling snowballs
at the inferno, but there was nothing you could really do,
only watch the family standing close to the heat and try to guess
how they must feel. It was a stove, somebody told me. Stoves
were always going wrong and the old houses were constantly
burning down until, today, only three hundred and forty-nine were left. Only the men at Aygaz, witnessing this impressive
demonstration of the dangers inherent in competing fuel systems,
may perhaps not have been moved to tears.
Inebolu had burnt before. On March 19 1881, the year of
Mustafa Kemal's birth, three hundred and fifteen houses were
destroyed by fire. At that time there had been a British Consul
in town to telegraph for assistance. Today it felt, in spite of Atattirk and a venerable history, as if no Consul would ever
return.'Did they like the snail project?' I asked Erdogan Bey on
my return to the hotel.
'They loved it,' he exclaimed, slapping me across the back.
'Georgia, here I come.'
Night fell and Inebolu's electricity supply died with it so that
the last embers of the burnt-out house could be seen fluttering
against the dark of the mountains behind us. Erdogan Bey
reckoned that heavy snowfalls in the mountains had brought
down the power lines. Moonlight filtered through the clouds
and rose from the waves in a pale wash that touched at the
windows of the hotel. Erdogan Bey brought me a plate of red
mullet and salad, and a glass of milky-white raki. From beyond
a candle he watched me eat, and smoked pensively. He was
thinking not only of Georgia's snails but of a possible ferry link
between Inebolu and Yalta on the Crimean coast to the north.
For it was his dream that one day ships might once more call
at Inebolu. Five thousand dollars, he said, was all he needed.
But then just a few notes was all anyone ever needed,
including the two Natashas Erdogan Bey told me had turned
up at the hotel that morning looking to exchange precious lira
for routine favours.
'Ah, Natashas,' 1 murmured, understanding now.
'I told them the hotel was fully booked,' Erdogan Bey
explained. 'It's a big problem keeping Russian girls and
Turkish men apart. They represent an irresistible trading
opportunity. The Russian girls like Turkish lira,' he tutted,
'and the Turkish men like Russian seks.'
The Turkish language is littered with imported words,
often exact phonetic transliterations, to describe objects or
concepts originally foreign to Turkish. From the French,
highly influential in the last century, comes sofor (chauffeur);
gise (guichet, ticket office); gar (gare, station); bisiklet (bicyclette, bicycle); camyon (camion, truck); and even, on the subject of
couches, sezlong (chaise longue). From the English comes sampiyon (champion), feribot (ferryboat), miting (meeting), and
even aysberk (iceberg). And from either language comes seks.'I love your country,' I told Erdogan Bey after a few more
glasses of raki. 'But I am suspicious of any language that does
not have its own word for sex.'
'Oh, we have a word,' he replied. 'But it's like your word
. . . you know.'
'Which word?'
Anxious that none of the hotel's skeleton staff might hear
him, he leaned forward. 'Fogging,' he whispered.
Sex had never been a subject for discussion in traditional
Turkey. Not that it had ever been the only topic in, say
Victorian England, but at least the English had never had to
import a foreign word to fill the gap when the luvvie-feelie
twentieth century came along. In Turkey, it seemed, there had
been a samizdat sexual vocabulary to provide basic artillery for
desire or insult - and no more. If the Turkish language was anything
to go by, Erdogan Bey could expect calls from a few more
Natashas, for demand is as sure as water to find its own level.
The power returned and with it the television serving its
traditionally long hours in homes and hotels throughout
Turkey. Typical of the Turkish winter, a weather report told
of several thousand villages cut off by snow. Further east, an
entire village had been wiped out by an avalanche ten days
earlier, taking the lives of fifty people. At the window, large
flakes of snow were sticking.
'You should take tomorrow's bus,' Erdogan Bey told me.
'Otherwise, you may be here for some time. Go east; it will
be cold but if you find fezzes anywhere, you'll find them in
the east.'
A television report told of another assassination attempt.
This time, a gang in a car had trailed a prominent businessman
through Istanbul. Only the jamming of their rocket launcher's
firing mechanism had foiled them. But there had also been
successes for the security forces in Diyarbakir, the capital city
of Turkey's predominantly Kurdish south-east, where fifteen
suspected terrorists had been captured. They had been made to
stand in the corner of the room, faces to the wall like classroomdelinquents, while the camera tracked across the table in front
of them. A haul of machine-guns, pistols, grenades, and high
explosives had been neatly arranged there. The centrepiece
consisted of bullets standing on end which spelt out the words
of the apprehending agency: TO Polis Diyarbakir': Turkish
Republic Police, Diyarbakir; the spoils of war arranged as
birthday cake decorations.
It felt like another version of the old story. For the
Diyarbakir fifteen would choose to call themselves nationalists
just as Mustafa Kemal's followers had done, only Kurdish ones
in this instance. And the munitions that once came ashore in
Inebolu were now smuggled in from Syria and Iran. Rocket
launchers had replaced howitzer shells, but the patterns of
resistance were always recurring.
That night, as I lay in bed, I heard the sound of breakers at
the window and was reminded of another traveller who had
come this way in 1935. Her ferry had anchored off the port,
and she watched the pretty houses along the shore. Skiffs
crewed by eight men and loaded with provisions were oared
towards the ferry, and the traveller found herself marvelling at
their skill among the breakers so that a fellow passenger turned
to her and told her that the men of Inebolu were famed for
their seamanship.
It was seamanship which had been honed during the
secretive landings of munitions through the long war years
between 1919 and 1922. I imagined red and yellow longboats
beaching below my window under cover of darkness. I saw
rifles, crates of bullets, and howitzer shells being unloaded and
carried up the beach. I saw men, women, and children loading
the carts. And when the carts were full, the people shouldering
the boxes and the bullet belts and setting off up the long track
on foot, over the mountains to the Nationalist armies at
Ankara and to the east. The families surrendered their linen for
bandages, their spare socks and shoes for the soldiers, and gave
up their riding animals and their horsecarts. But more was
asked of them, and they gave sons and daughters, husbandsand wives to fall in battle or from the effects of cold and
exhaustion along the way I had come that morning.
This, then, was the little port which had made modern
Turkey possible. Rather than the inspiring example of Gallipoli
in 1915, the great victories of the Independence War, the
conferences where the Turkish ideal cohered, or the three
towns whose names were assigned honorary prefixes - Warrior,
Hero, and Glorious - in recognition of the Independence
War bravery of their citizens, it had all begun in this unassuming
place where the guns had come ashore.
The town was the packhorse of emerging Turkey, and in
the high-profile glories of the Independence War its role was
easily forgotten. But unsung heroism of the packhorse variety
is often the best kind and packhorses do not mind being
forgotten. All that had offended Inebolu was the attempted
ban in 1937 on what was described as undignified portering.
The Turkish people had roundly ignored the new law. I had
seen them in Kastamonu, would see them all over Turkey,
and in their refusal to countenance the portering ban was
perhaps the grateful understanding that the country's very
existence depended upon what the government had once
chosen to call the indignity of heavy loads down by the sea at
Inebolu.chapter six




On September 2 1925, the day that Atattirk left Inebolu,
Turkish civil servants were first compelled to wear Western
hats, and lift the brims when saluting. Failure to do so could
mean a year's imprisonment. It was announced that the fez
would become illegal for all citizens, barring some branches of
the clergy, on November 25, and would be punishable by
three months' imprisonment.
That summer, Sir Telford Waugh had been on leave in
England. He would go on to complete forty-four years of
distinguished service in the dragomanate or interpreter's office,
accompanying the Ambassador and other senior British diplomats
on official visits in Constantinople, Ankara, and elsewhere
in the Republic. It had been a beautiful summer in
England but Sir Telford always looked forward to his return
to Constantinople, the cool breezes among the plane trees as
autumn blew its gentle way up the Bosphorus. Sir Telford
thought he knew Constantinople as well as anybody, but as
the time for his return drew near, a chance scrap of information
led him to suppose that something momentous had happened
in his absence; a hat manufacturer in London mentioned in
passing that he had recently received an unprecedented enquiry
from Constantinople. They apparently wanted hats, thirty
thousand of them, and Constantinople did not often order
hats.
In fact, hat demand in Constantinople was reaching fever
pitch by late October, when the pressure on fezzes was stepped
up. Although not yet officially illegal, nightwatchmen were
given orders to go from house to house and seek out allsurviving fezzes. On October 29, the anniversary of the
founding of the Republic, the authorities exploited the nationalist
fervour on the streets to openly admonish persistent fez
wearers. That morning, hawkers did a roaring trade in what
passed as hats. Fez wearers soon suffered Republicans knocking
the fezzes from their heads just as they had habitually done to
the homburgs of passing infidels.
The morning of November 25 broke strangely silent. In
the heart of Constantinople near the Dolmabahce Palace, home
of the last Ottoman Sultans, the muezzin trudged up the steps
to appear on the balcony of his minaret, with a 1900 model
bowler pulled down hard over his ears. With an apocalyptic
sense of foreboding, he started to sing, wondering how long
his incensed God would allow him to continue. After a few
uneasy notes, he discovered to his surprise that he was still
alive but in a world that had become unrecognizable.
In the weeks that followed, Western hats were imported
into Turkey by the million. They came by ship and by train,
bowlers and homburgs, panamas and flat caps, but they did
not come in sufficient numbers to meet the demand. In
Ankara, the hat stores were continually sold out. In Constantinople,
even the countless new shops that sprang up overnight
could not keep pace. Such was the shortage that the prefect of
the city, Emin Bey, set restrictions on the profit that could
legally be made on hats, 15% on the standard ones and 25%
on more fancy models. On his return, Sir Telford discovered
that several of his old bowlers and homburgs had been
requisitioned by desperate Turkish staff members at the dragomanate.
In fact, securing a hat in hat-starved Constantinople
was only half the battle. It had always been a dandy's city
where even the boatmen and the porters made a point of
wearing their fezzes at just the right angle. How to wear the
thing, this new-fangled hat, was just as taxing a problem. Not
content with upsetting their world, the new order was now threatening them with sartorial humiliation.
'How to Wear the Hat' articles that appeared in the presswere voraciously consumed. Illiterate stokers, hawkers, and
fishermen pressed passing teachers and lawyers into service to
read to them from the relevant articles. But the problem was
as much with the hats themselves as with the wearing of them;
there was no correct way of wearing many of the irredeemable
styles that were being unloaded on the unsuspecting Turkish
population. The Borsalino Brothers, Italian milliners with an
eye for the main chance, had been anchored in the Bosphorus
waiting for official endorsement of the Hat Laws before
landing at Constantinople a shipful of Western hats which, in
the ephemeral fashions of 1920s Europe, were now laughably
outmoded. Not that the local population was to know. The
menfolk from a village near Izmir ended up proudly arrayed
in a selection of pink feathered hats complete with ribbons as
they went about their business as cobblers, blacksmiths, and
farmers. 'Woollen bonnets on bearded porters, woollen Balaclavas
on smart lounge suits,' read a contemporary account.
Old stocks of fez felt were dyed a less conspicuous colour and
fashioned into shapes intended to resemble hats. The Times correspondent in Constantinople reported creations made from
'materials more appropriate for a Christmas cracker or a seaside
comedian . . . Duty before Dignity, as the bosun said; Progress
before Dignity, says Turkey.'
By 1993, the passing of time had claimed many of Turkey's
fez wearers. Those who survived had lived through such
pulses of history that the abolition of a hat sixty-eight years
ago had been largely erased from their elderly memories.
There was seventy-eight-year-old Faik Kurtar, who had
been a baby when his family came to Turkey from Albania.
Faik Bey remembered that he was a fez-wearing primary
school pupil when the hat laws were introduced. 'We knew all
about cowboy hats in American culture,' he told me in his
Istanbul flat. 'Homburgs were so similar that we imagined
ourselves as cowboys. And you can imagine how that made us
feel as kids.'
Sara was an eighty-eight-year-old lady living on the Asianside of the Bosphorus, in the grounds of what remained of the
family's Ottoman estate. She sat surrounded by cats and by
portraits of befezzed relatives including those of her grandfathers,
who had come from Poland and Germany to settle in
Turkey during the last century, and of her brother, who had
been killed in action in the Dardanelles in 1915. I asked her
what she remembered of the revolution.
'Which particular one?' she asked with the formidable
panache of a seasoned witness of revolutions.
'The Atattirk one,' I replied meekly.
Sara's eyes brightened. 'Such fun it was,' she replied.
'And the abolition of the fez?'
Sara waved her arm, scattering a number of cats. 'It was
time for it to go,' she replied. 'For most of us, the fez was
quite out of date. There's a saying in Turkey: "If you don't
know Paris, you're a donkey," and they never wore fezzes in
Paris. Personally, I prefer Pakistan but there you are.'
Ziyad Bey, an eighty-two-year-old academic and journalist,
was recovering from a stroke when I met him. He was
attending the lycee in Galatasaray, Istanbul, on November 25
1925 and only harboured memories of a transitional chaos of
Western caps, fezzes, and bare heads in a classroom that only
the day before had harboured a sea of fezzes.
'In the east, the authorities knew that the conversion to
hats would not be so easy,' Ziyad Bey told me. 'So the
authorities chose a bayram - a festival day - to persuade
everybody in one particularly reactionary area to wear a shapka, as we called the Western hat, if only for that day. The local
people looked at the decree, scratched their heads, and wondered,
knowing nothing of hat wearing, what sort of shapka they should wear. A dissident politician from western Turkey,
who had been exiled to the area for his reactionary views,
recommended to the locals a particular kind of hat. On the bayram hundreds of men appeared accordingly, wearing heavenly
creations made from cerise taffeta. Heaven knows where
they got them from. Apparently, Atattirk was furious . . .'Ziyad Bey showed me a 1924 photograph of himself among
the Galatasaray Lycee's alumni. The photograph was sixty
nine years old, the man it portrayed young and proud, and the
fez that he wore served to place him in a different world. I had
never seen such a thing, a photograph of a fez on the head of a
Turk who was still alive.
The memories of young people going about their lives are
not so long. Time has unravelled, and the red hat has receded.
Dust has settled, all those old enough to understand what their
fezzes meant to them are long dead, and the file has been
closed.
Was this - the fading photograph of a man dressed in a fez,
young and strong then but now stroke ridden and frail - as
close as I would ever get? Was the rest just fezzes discarded by
the million, as those Turks with a more theatrical sense of
history had taken themselves down to the water and, after
perhaps casting a last fond glance at the hat which had served
them so well, tossed their fezzes into the Bosphorus in such
numbers that the waters ran red with their drowning reflections?
Or left them to be collected by the Red Crescent (the
Turkish equivalent of the Red Cross) so that they might be
turned into slippers for the infirm and the destitute? Doubtless,
nobody will have smiled quite like the Gazi as converted fezzes
were trod underfoot until the soles eventually broke up, and
the detested badge of ignorance became dust that was lost on
the winter wind, and Turkey was believed free of the past.
It was time to head east where, as Ziyad Bey had put it,
the conversion to hats had not been so easy. I had been in
Inebolu for as long as Ataturk, who had had civic occasions
galore, revelled in the love of staunch Republican countrymen,
and drunk plenty of raki. I'd left the love of his countrymen to
the Natashas and settled for the raki, and fried anchovies fresh
from the Black Sea in the little fish restaurant on the seafront.
Fresh snow, which had been menacing the town for days
now, finally laid itself down in the vacuum hours of the night,
falling along the promenade and the breakwater, ringing thesteering-wheels of the tractors and piling silently against the
gunwales of the fishing boats while the waves rolled along the
shore, slurping at the shingle.
Amongst snowflakes and rogue ashes from the burnt-out
house littering the wind, I left Inebolu early the next morning,
but only just. Erdogan Bey had made a few fixerly phone calls
for me; the bus didn't normally stop for anybody but with his
help, his expression suggested, it might just stop for me. It
didn't; the only bus flew blithely past the hotel in a flurry of
flakes. I liked Inebolu, but not sufficiently to stay until the
spring. Erdogan Bey swore richly, bundled me into his car,
gunned it out of a snowdrift, and set off in frantic pursuit. We
slalomed past the port on the outskirts of town, horn hooting
and lights flashing. We attracted the attention of two men
huddled on a fishing boat that swung at anchor in the bay.
While they waved bemusedly and a stray dog watched us out
of sight, the bus continued through the early morning
unheeding.
It did not help that the wiper on Erdogan Bey's side of the
windscreen had frozen solid. In his attempts to free it, the
wiper came off in his hands. He was left to brandish it through
the open side-window while guessing at our direction largely
by instinct.
'Right,' I said with the tentativeness of the passenger who
has to balance a dislike of passenger drivers with the indubitable
benefit of a functioning wiper as we approached a hairpin
corner on two wheels. 'Left,' I croaked as the road swung
violently the other way.
'Fogging bus--' Erdogan Bey broke momentarily into
English. He was a shy man but not shy enough to recognize
that our best chance of catching the errant bus lay in lying
across me, propping himself on an elbow that rested heavily
in my crotch, and driving with one hand while he watched the
road from the unimpeded view on my side of the car. I
watched the back of his neck, where grey hairs sprawled from
their pores.

98


'Fogg, fogg, fogg,' muttered Erdogan Bey. But we were
gaining. One hundred yards, fifty yards, twenty yards until,
with a combination of flashing lights, honking horn, and
flailing arms that must finally have struck the bus driver as
unusual even by Turkish driving standards, we succeeded in
bringing him to a halt. Erdogan Bey bore down on the driver
with his broken wiper.
'You were supposed to pick him up at the hotel, you
idiot!' he shouted, jabbing at him. 'And you've broken my
wiper.'
The driver looked apologetic. 'Nobody told me,' he
replied. 'I saw you through my rear-view mirror. You were
hooting your horn. You were in his lap. I thought you were
getting married.' He looked at me curiously. 'Is he a tourist?
What on earth is he doing here at this time of year?'
'He's looking for fezzes,' replied Erdogan Bey, as if this
were explanation enough.
The bemused driver waved me on board in a flurry of
apologies and set off. We left Erdogan Bey tending to his
broken wiper as the snow threatened to engulf him, and
headed east, deep into Turkey. An unbroken stand of pine
trees, heavy with precarious ledges of snowfall, shepherded
the road to our right, and the sea broke beyond the foreshore
to our left. We passed isolated mosques and the skeletons of
old fishing boats, and the remains of an old jetty, a few stumps
black against the sea.
In a place called Turkeli, I waited for the next bus in a
small waiting room where a gas fire hummed, alone except for
a listless boy in charge of bus tickets. I could not see anything beyond the window except for a whiteness of snow and the
suggestion of buildings. The place made me think that perhaps,
due to an unfortunate convergence of low season, low temperatures,
and sheer geographical remoteness, I had slipped
quite by chance into a dimension not yet discovered by the
outside world. My guidebooks revealed a chilling lack of
reference to any place called Turkeli.'English?' the boy asked me.
'English,' I replied without enthusiasm.
He pondered this for a moment. 'Glass?' he said, pointing
at the tea in front of him. I thought for a moment that he was
offering a traveller some fortifying kindness, but he was
actually just practising his English.
'Glass,' I nodded wearily.
'Window?'
'Window.'
I took refuge in the fact that given the sheer lack of visuals,
the English lesson could not last. As if to scotch that presumption
right away, the boy said 'cat, dog' before settling into an
unbroken stare at the television screen where mouths hung
slack in American drawls long after each item of Turkish
dubbing had passed. A team of karate experts were invading
the grounds of a large house heavily guarded by men in
ridiculous suits and irredeemable haircuts which unmistakably
indicated the 1970s. Even the Americans, I reflected, had had
their sartorial dark ages; it just seemed curious that the current
Turkish one had continued so long.
I palmed away the condensation at the window and
busied myself watching hats pass in the street. In Turkeli, it
seemed, the homburg and the panama were not favourite.
Here were grey flat caps tugged tight on to the head, crying
out for an attendant whippet and pint of Tetley's above tattered
grey jackets that had been stained and stitched a thousand
times. Then there was a more colourful and flamboyant style
where the cap extended beyond the head on all sides, a style
Scottish in origin reminding me at once of that country's
golfers, its football fans, and even of its rock bands, such as
the Bay City Rollers, which had permanently scarred the
vulnerable psyches of everybody unfortunate enough to have
been young, impressionable and with access to radio or
television in the early seventies. But even listening to the
Rollers was as nothing compared to the sufferings of these
people, who actually dressed like them. As I watched themmeandering through the slushy town, I knew that whatever
the wider social effect of Ataturk's dress reforms, they had
condemned these people to a sartorial winter from which they
might never recover.
Invariably, there was the same grey jacket with at least
second-generation stitching (detectable by the alien thread
colours) unravelling along the seam between the shoulders,
and trousers that had come from quite another suit. The
history of the trousers' previous owners was revealed - like
the rings in a tree trunk - by the old stitch lines that encircled
the material above a frayed and dirt-spattered conclusion - it
could hardly be described as a hem - to the trouser leg.
Suffice it to say, I was thankful when the next bus
eventually came and spirited me away, content to watch from
my window as we wound up a cliff road above the sea, the
rear wheels girded with chains to stop them sliding across the
icy snow. When the chains alone proved insufficient, the
passengers gravitated to the back of the bus to improve the
grip there. For one alarming moment, when the driver's best
efforts came to nothing, we slid backwards down a slope a
few brief yards from a precipice but survived to pass a police
car in a ditch, which caused much glee and prompted everybody
to get out as if to help - but primarily to indulge in a few
disparaging comments. The policeman's dependence on our
assistance seemed to make my fellow passengers reckless.
'Yes,' said one, shaking his head as he leant heavily against the
bonnet and started to push. 'You've got to know how to drive
in these conditions.'
'Not the problem,' another corrected him. 'It's these cars,
you know. Crap.'
Otherwise, I remember very little of that day, withdrawing
into my own thoughts as the views at the window were
obscured by white-out. Around me, the sound of sunflower
seeds being cracked between teeth - and the slight whistle as
the shells were spat out - induced a rhythm of indolent
introspection. I fell to thinking of all the foreigners who hadpreceded me to Turkey to mourn one hat's passing and to
resent the coming of a new one.
In the 1830s and '40s, no foreign traveller to Turkey had
been the least bit enthusiastic about the new-fangled fez.
Mockingly, they compared the appearance of its wearer, in
combination with the standard black frock coat, as akin to a
red-topped bottle of claret. 'A miserable substitute for the
splendid turban,' one Reverend Walsh condemned it. 'The
magical effects of a turban are well known,' wrote a regretful
Sir Adolphus Slade in the 1830s. it gives depth to light eyes,
expression to dark eyes; it softens harsh features, relieves
delicate ones.'
Julia Pardoe, writing in 1834, was the most unforgiving of
all. I cannot forbear to record my regret as I beheld in every
direction the hideous and unmeaning fez. The costly turban,
that bound the brow like a diadem, and relieved by the richness
of its tints the dark hue of the other garments, has now almost
entirely disappeared from the streets.'
Writing in the same period, Stratford Canning at the British
Embassy in Constantinople wistfully observed that 'every
person who has been absent and has returned notices the
change, which has been most extraordinary. Very few years
more and not a turban will exist . . . employees of every
description now wear the red cap ... no gold embroidery, no
jewels, no pelisses.'
But just as the 'hideous and unmeaning fez' of the 1830s
had become a cherished symbol of Turkish orthodox and
Islamic identity by the 1920s, so a later generation of foreigners
would bemoan the abolition of a hat which had become, in the
words of Sir Harry Luke writing in the 1950s, 'part of the
picturesque variety of becoming and aesthetically pleasing
clothes'. Harry A. Franck, an American writer and journalist,
wrote in 1928: 'To one coming from still colourful Syria and
the lands south of it, the arrival in a defezzed Turkey was
almost painful . . . the crowd was as drab as a bunch of Italian
subway muckers . . . the average gathering of Turkish mensuggests a tramp convention.' Like the Turks themselves,
foreign travellers had adapted to the fez until they too felt it
worth defending.
Unlike the Turks, however, these travellers did not seem
to regard the prohibition of turbans and fezzes as a moral issue,
and made no suggestion that personal preference rather than
the law should dictate one's dress. Rather, the tone of their
observations was aesthetic outrage, as if the Turks served
merely to bring colour and decoration to the landscapes
through which these travellers passed. It was hard to imagine
that the Turks shared their view. 'We can't possibly wear
fezzes,' will they have exclaimed in the 1830s? 'Think of Julia
Pardoe's new book.' 'Surely not flat caps,' will they have
agonized in the 1920s? 'Harry A. Franck won't forgive us.' "I
don't know what Sir Harry will say,' will they have shaken
their heads ominously in the 1950s, 'what with all these
aesthetically unpleasing clothes.'
But Sir Harry was more sympathetic when he made the
following observation in 1955, not on the visual effect of the
ensemble but on the Turks themselves. 'I have seen bald old
white beards,' he wrote, 'look shamefaced in their cast-off shapkas, obviously and uncomfortably aware that with their
fezzes has gone something of their human dignity.'
After an absence of five years, a war damage assessor called
Harold Armstrong landed on Turkey's southern coast one
summer's day in 1928. The impact of the hat laws struck
Armstrong the moment he set foot on the shore. He saw
bashed-in bowlers on barefoot porters, a villager in a decrepit
straw boater selling curdled cream, and an old man in a
battered tweed coat and what Armstrong described as a
home-made dunce's cap. In Armstrong's description was a
poignancy which did not bemoan the dowdy sights he himself
was obliged to endure but rather regretted what he perceived
among these people as an engrained sense of affront, as if their
identities had been stolen from them. In these new hats was
their rebirth, against the wishes of many of them, into a newworld where God and tradition, and the order of things which
had governed their lives for so long, had a vastly diminished
place.
Afternoon became evening as we passed through groves of
hazel and oak silvered by snow. At Sinop, I thought of the
obedient old man of that town by the sea who had bought
himself a brimmed hat at the market to satisfy Ataturk's new
law in 1925. He was unaware that it was anything more than a giaour's hat until his friends laughed at him and told him his
choice of hat made him more giaour than the giaour; he had
chosen a broad-rimmed, Catholic bishop's hat. When they
told him so, the obedient old man lost his temper. He replaced
his fez and took the giaour's hat before the governor of the
town, flung it on the ground, trampled on it, and gave himself
up to arrest, prepared to hang rather than wear the hat of a
world that was not of his choosing. In Inebolu, there had been
times when I had sympathized with the banning of the fez.
Now I was far enough away to think again.
We reached Samsun, easterly bastion of republicanism, in
time for supper. I waited for the last bus inland in a canteen by
the station. A football match was showing on the television
which sat on an ornate metal sweet trolley suspended three
feet below the ceiling. I watched, transfixed not only by the
trolley but also by the fact that one of the teams hailed from
Gaziantep, which translates as Warrior - or even destroyer of
Christians - Pistachio. Atattirk had decided to assign the town
an honorific prefix on account of its proud record during the
War of Independence in the 1920s, evidently judging that
Pistachio alone was by no means silly enough a name.
I ate stuffed peppers, watched Destroyer of Christians
Pistachio get a creditable away draw, and took my seat on the
bus. Outside, light fell on one of Samsun's many busts of Atattirk. The snow had perched upon his bare head. Perhaps it
was the late hour, or thinking too much about Turkish clothes,
but whichever way I looked at the bust it seemed to me that
the snowfall had arranged itself to furnish the Gazi, theWarrior, with one of those Turkeli flat caps. No doubt he
would approve. Inland, where I was headed, the snowfall was
much heavier. So I wondered whether meteorological revenge
was just now being wreaked on all the unwelcome busts of the
infidel Atattirk that dotted those high, reactionary steppelands
as the snow topped them silently out in fezzes.chapter seven

'There's a great stirring in Islam, something moving
on the face of the waters. They make no secret of it.
Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one was
about due now.'
John Buchan, Greenmantle, 1916

'Among the lower classes and the peasants, no matter
what headgear they wear, after a time it takes on a
shape similar to that of the fez.'
Report from Istanbul, New York Times, October 5 1930


'The Turks about here,' declared an exasperated Sivas missionary
in the late 1800s, 'are just about the inside-outsidest
and the outside-insidest, the bottomside-upwardest and topside-downwardest,
the backside-forwardest and the forwardside-backwardest
people I have even seen.' With weather like
this, who could blame them?
Not long before our arrival, I'd woken to the burr of the
engine as the bus climbed in low gear through the night, and
found my head stuck fast to the ice that had formed on the
inside of the window. When I pulled gently away, I left three
of my favourite hairs buried in permafrost.
Anyone who has seen films of the late 1950s when everybody
travelled BOAC and always stopped, presidential-style,
at the top of the steps when disembarking to appear thoroughly
staggered by the heat will know what it felt like, but at the
other end of the thermometer, arriving in Sivas, even if it was
only by bus. 'Jesus Christ,' I remembered mumbling - the
wrong divinity but the right expletive - as I disembarked at
four thousand feet beneath a blue-black sky sequined with starsand a crescent moon honed razor sharp as if by the carving
action of frozen floes of air. Desiccated ice and snow, light as
moon dust, flurried at my feet and swirled around my ankles,
and for a brief moment I might have been a rock legend, but
one that would die young if he did not find shelter.
It was -21° celsius, a meat-freezer city relieved only by the
stipple of street lights and the warm yellow glow still showing
at the last few windows of its insomniac residents. Around
me, the steppe extended into an indistinct distance on all sides
but beyond it the moonlit jags of white peaks rose clear into
the sky.
The jaw of the slumbering hotel receptionist had come to
rest on the counter, where a thin thread of saliva was gradually
working its way earthwards from a slack mouth. He came to
on my approach, wiped away the dribble with the back of his
hand, transferred it to the seat of his trousers, and steered the
hotel register towards me. The scrawl of visitor entries
spidered across the pages. I dreamt of turning the pages of
Sivas hotel registers that the moths had long since eaten, to
find the entries for the closing months of 1925, of military
judges and hangmen.
In November, 1925, The Times in London imagined 'the
friends of the old order wearing the fez as a night cap, taking
it reverently out of a secret drawer, and dropping upon it tears
of forbidden affection'. But the people of Sivas, as they were
soon to prove, would not stop at tears.
In December of that year, when no one could have blamed
them for staying home and keeping warm, the people of Sivas
took to the streets, the mayor and several town councillors at
their head, railing at the iniquitous hat laws. Protest posters
were plastered upon the buildings and the green flag of Islam
was unfurled. Rioting broke out in Erzerum to the east where
demonstrators closed down the bazaar and gathered in front of
the pro-Ataturk governor's house, chanting that they would
never recognize the authority of infidel officials. In Mara? to
the south, the town which Atattirk had named Hero Maras,after its record during the Independence War, they gathered at
the main mosque to denounce the laws. In Trabzon, defiant
crowds wore their fezzes and accused the wicked government
of irreligion.
A state of emergency had been imposed earlier that year to
deal with a revolt in the Kurdish provinces in the south-east.
Since these extraordinary powers had not yet been withdrawn,
they could now quite constitutionally be deployed against fez
wearers. The military tribunals which had recently dealt with
armed, often fanatical Kurdish rebels were now directed to
deal equally ruthlessly with people wearing the wrong kind of
hats. The Navy dispatched a warship to move east along the
Black Sea coast. The warship anchored off the town of Rize
where rioters had threatened to kill panama wearers, her
presence indication if any were needed that the government
would go to whatever lengths were necessary to contain the
riots - even to the point of deploying irony. For as her
brooding grey shadow hung over Rize harbour, did it once
register that the menacing battlecruiser, now in the service of
the infidels, was named the Hamidiyeh in honour of Abdul
Hamid II, one of the great fez-wearing Sultans? Or that
Hamidiyeh was also the very name given to the particular type
of fez favoured by Abdul Hamid II, a boxy model with only
the slightest of tapers between rim and crown? Or was the
appreciation of irony those days in Rize perhaps diminished by
the prospect of long prison sentences or even the gallows?
For under martial law, few fez wearers would receive
anything as innocuous as the three-month sentences specified
by the hat legislation. Many of them would be faced with the
ultimate test of their faith; of the earthbound pull of gravity
against the noose on the one hand, and the ascension to
paradise supposedly guaranteed by the fez wearer's tassle,
which would prevail? The first sentences were passed in
Erzerum on November 28. Most of the hundred and fourteen
found guilty on charges varying between incitement to riotand violation of the Hat Laws received sentences of between
two and ten years. Three were condemned to death. On
December 21, two men were sentenced to hang in Giresun for
refusing to abandon their fezzes; several others received long
prison terms with hard labour for the same offence. Later in
December, eight people were hung in Rize. On January 18
1926, twenty-two people were sentenced in Hero Maras, six
of them to death. Hassib Bey, the ex-deputy for the town,
received ten years in spite of his ostensibly reasonable defence
that he had not worn a hat since he had not been able to find
one in the town. The six were executed the next day, on a cold
January morning; among them were a local preacher, a pilgrim,
the mayor of a nearby village, and a local muezzin. On
February 10, six men in the central Turkish city of Kayseri
received jail sentences of up to fifteen years for making anti
hat propaganda. And the author of an attack on infidel hats
which was placarded on the walls of a Sivas village was hanged
by the sentence of a local tribunal.
Even on the European side of the Bosphorus, Constantinople
people were arrested for fez wearing and for publishing
samizdat tracts with titles like 'Hats and Imitating the Frank'.
A deputy in the Turkish Parliament who publically objected
to the Hat Laws and had voted against the legislation was
spotted wearing his unrimmed kalpak in Ankara. He was
eventually charged with incitement and stripped of his rank.
If the authorities presumed that such draconian measures
would do for the fez, then they were mistaken. By 1929, mass
arrests of fez wearers were still commonplace across the
country. Then, in October 1930, they found the fez packages
in Bursa.
One hundred and fourteen packages of forbidden fezzes
were uncovered by the security forces in this western city. The
packets contained enough fezzes to dress a majority of the
town's male population. The authorities claimed the discovery
as a major security success but it might as well have been takenas indication of just how widespread the illegal fez trade had
become. A warning was issued that anyone found engaging in
the fez trade would be subject to the ultimate sanction.
Two months later, a revolt broke out in the town of
Menemen, or Omelette, near Izmir. A local dervish called
Mehmet, who regarded it as his divine mission to wage a holy
war against the Kemalist regime, masterminded a plot that
envisaged co-ordinated uprisings in Omelette and the nearby
towns of Manisa and Balikesir combining to culminate in the
sack of Izmir and the fall of the Kemalists, the restitution of
the Caliphate and the triumphant return of the fez.
Dervish Mehmet embarked with eight of his religious
lieutenants on a forty-day fast, an advanced course in outrage
designed to ready them for insurrection. On the first day, they
carried a stock of dates and a large jar of water into a room at
Mehmet's house and, after locking themselves in, they each
ate forty dates and drank plenty of water. On the days that
followed, they each ate one date less and drank proportionately
less water, a countdown to the fortieth day when, half-starved,
mostly crazed, and wholly out of dates, they sallied forth in
the name of God and fezzes.
Unfortunately, they quite forgot about Manisa and Balikesir.
They could eat dates, but clearly could not keep to them.
But for this, the revolt's impact might have been far reaching.
As it was, when Dervish Mehmet and his incensed retinue set
out to raise the ire of the people of Omelette, their fellow
conspirators in Manisa and Balikesir were still at home, their
date-eating far from concluded.
A large and animated crowd gathered. Amidst the calls for
the restoration of Islamic law, the overthrow of the godless
regime, the restoration of the Arabic script and of the fez, a
young soldier was shot. Dervish Mehmet hacked the head
from the corpse and paraded it round the town. A further nine
lives -- a nightwatchman, a young teacher, four local residents,
and three rioters - were lost in the ensuing fracas.
Martial law was immediately imposed on the area and

nosome two hundred offenders, largely sheikhs and religious
teachers but also policemen and officers of the state sympathetic
to the uprising, were tried in January 1931. On February
3, twenty-eight people were hanged, among them a Jewish
shopkeeper named Joseph who was accused of applauding the
death of the young soldier. Even so, as he tied his own rope
and kicked away the stool, Joseph shouted: 'Long live the
Turkish Republic.'
But it was the dramatic escape from the gallows of a young
man called Ismail Hussein that dominated the headlines. His
captors mistakenly assumed from the way Ismail held his
hands behind his back that the young man was already secured.
But at the last moment he threw off his noose, leapt from the
gallows, broke through the cordon of troops, and disappeared
into the crowd.
For two weeks, the twenty-five-year-old ran the gauntlet
of the authorities. He was rumoured to have been spirited
away to the Greek islands but in fact had taken to the winter
hills behind the town. From there, he might have migrated
into Turkish lore as a fez-wearing bandit, like the writer Yasar
Kemal's Mehmet in his masterpiece novel, Mehmet My Hawk. The Turkish Robin Hood, Mehmet denies the authority of the
state and is sheltered by sympathetic villagers. He strikes fear
and awe into those who hunt him, at one with the mountain,
its escape routes, and the hidden valleys in which he may find
sanctuary.
But Ismail Hussein did not find his bandits and thence his
escape into folklore. Instead, he succumbed to hunger and
cold, and on his bedraggled arrival at a village was promptly
handed over to the authorities in return for the thousand lira
reward that they had posted. Ismail Hussein was successfully
hanged on February 18 1930.
Such, however, was the continued resistance to the Hat
Laws that rumours of their imminent repeal began to circulate.
A cargo ship containing tens of thousands of fezzes bound for
Bulgaria and its ethnic Turkish community was delayed forseveral weeks off the city which had recently been renamed Istanbul. The delay was the work of a prominent merchant
who, inclined to believe in the rumours and looking to turn a
quick profit, turned to understanding friends high up in the
port authorities. Clearly, however, what friends the merchant £
had in the ministry responsible for hats were not so influential,
for the rumours rapidly dispersed. The merchant was eventually
obliged to allow the ship to proceed and to pay considerable demurrage charges.
In fact, as late as 1947, some six hundred people were being
arrested annually for infringement of the Hat Laws. Those
who had reluctantly succumbed to the ways of the infidel
rarely did so unconditionally, and wore handkerchiefs on their
heads beneath the hat to stop it defiling them. Police were (
detailed to pull the hats from suspects' heads, remove any
handkerchiefs they found there, and jam the hats hard on to
the crowns. And in 1950, in anticipation of the new religious
freedoms promised by the popular opposition party, a wave of
fez wearing occurred across the East.
It was in a village near Sivas in the late 1930s that the writer
Lilo Linke met 'an old man with a white beard and a brown
woollen cap - the nearest thing to a fez that he was allowed to
wear'. The old man, resentful as ever at the Hat Laws, invited [
Linke to his house to hear his story. In spite of the laws, the
old man had continued to wear his fez until the head of the
village, that 'bastard pig of a man', had eventually fined him.
His response was simply to stay indoors, befezzed, for as long
as he could bear it. After two weeks, however, his resistance
broke and he sent his son to the market in Sivas with
instructions to buy him a hat, resigned to the fact that most of
the other villagers had long since fallen in with the new laws
and figuring that his God could hardly blame him for the irreligious impositions of the state. So the old man waited.
'And one day,' he told Linke, 'inshallah, the wicked government
would be swept away; until then, he kept his fez carefully
hidden.'Governments were indeed swept away, most of them on
the whim of disenchanted army officers, but the fez policy of
those that replaced them has remained almost invariably unchanged, and Turkey's old men are still waiting. As late as
1980, during another period of martial law in Turkey, Philip
Glazebrook was travelling through eastern Turkey on a journey
that would eventually become the basis for his classic
account Journey to Kars. On the road east of Erzurum, Glaze
brook found himself sitting on a bus next to an 'old fellow in
a kind of turban' when they were stopped at an army road
block. The old man's reaction was to remove the turban and
replace it with 'a cap drawn from the bosom of his shirt'. Once
they were clear of the road block, the old man replaced the cap
with his turban, flouting a law which seems ridiculous rather
than sinister only because it was circumvented in so dismissively
perfunctory a fashion.
I remembered the turban I'd seen in Soapmakers two weeks
earlier, and several similar ones I'd glimpsed since, dun head
wraps, Mrs Mop-style, with none of the neatness of the Indian
equivalent. The turban was definitely about. How had it
endured as part of the Turkish dress in spite of a hundred-and
sixty-year ban whereas the fez appeared to have been all but
eradicated in sixty-five years?
Glazebrook's old man supplied the clue. Whereas the
turban could be whipped off at the first sign of danger and
buried in a pocket, as the old man so neatly demonstrated, the
inflexible structure of the fez was not suited to such pragmatic
resistance. Nor indeed was its colour. For while the turbans
I'd seen in Turkey tended to be greys, beiges and faded
yellows, unlikely to attract the censorious attention of officious
policemen and soldiers, the fez was a defiant, unabashed, and
conspicuous maroon that knew not a jot about camouflage.
And there was dashing gallantry in that. It was the headgear
equivalent of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Ever since my arrival in Turkey weeks earlier, my own fez
had languished at the bottom of my bag. No gallant, I wasfearful of wearing it. Besides, it seemed unseemly to wear as a
writerly experiment a hat for which people had once been
hanged. In Sivas, it struck me, the impoverished tourist's hat I
had bought in Pomegranate almost a year before might be
restored to something of its true former danger, the badge of
overt, uncompromised resistance that its history, shape, and
colour had made it. Again, I was reminded of Yazar Kemal's
glamorous fictional brigand, Mehmet, who is handed the
uniform by which he is initiated when he first flees to the
mountains: 'Each brigand was wearing a red fez, as is the
custom in the mountains, where the red fez is the badge of
brigandage. A brigand wearing a cap or hat, as men now do
in the villages and cities, has never yet been seen.' Mehmet is
arguably the most popular character in modern Turkish literature.
But in the eyes of the Turkish authorities, he has long
been a subversive, wearing a subversive's hat. And like the
hat, the book, first published in 1958, was outlawed itself for
a period by the Turkish authorities.
In my mind, I figured, something of Mehmet's fictional
heroics, resisting the wrongs perpetrated or at least condoned
by the state, had rubbed off on all of Turkey's fez wearers. Fez
wearing, fez trading, defiance of the Hat Laws, were brave if
bizarre defences of a cherished way of life. In their defence of
the fez was a refusal to accept the affront inherent in the Hat
Laws; that by changing the hats of the people, the government
could instantly reinvent them as citizens in the required
Western image, as if they were ciphers, tabulae rasae, empty
heads curiously immune to the centuries that had formed
them.
'Your occupation, please,' the receptionist interrupted my
musings as I stared at the register in the Sivas hotel. 'Write
down your occupation.' Like other travellers who had passed
through Ledgerland, that vast tract of Asia and the Middle
East ridden by bureaucracy, I might have observed the old
tradition and described my occupation as Time Lord, microlite
pilot, or some other such nonsense for the simple pleasure ofthe receptionist's subsequent nod, satisfied in spite of his total
lack of English that all was in order. But tonight, daring to
hope I might be near my quarry, I instead wrote 'fez
researcher'. No act of resistance, no gesture of solidarity was
I ever so covert, so compromised. The receptionist yawned and
handed me a key. He evidently spoke English.
'You won't find fezzes here,' he said dismissively. 'We
don't wear them. Good night.'
'Ah, a modern Turk,' I muttered to myself, and took myself off to bed.
I was back on the case again the next morning even as I
awoke, and palmed away the condensation at the window. I
had developed an obsessive's habit - of examining crowds
I from the neck up, my gaze skimming along at about five feet
like a low-flying reconnaissance plane in the hope of glimpsing
that maroon flash of resistance. But Sivas' main street was the
same, a slouching sea of flat caps and bobble hats. Julia Pardoe,
the nineteenth-century writer, had disparaged the befezzed Turkish crowd by comparing it to a sea of poppies. Was it in
some way indicative of the twentieth century that I saw from
my window nothing so colourful as poppies, just fragmented
greys, a sunless hatscape as if of drear ploughed fields?
An accumulation of concrete faqades reared above glass-
fronted banks and kebab houses. Smoke poured from flues in
the walls inches above the heads of crouched shoeshine boys
and combined with the gouts of frozen air intermingled with
cigarette smoke that streamed from their mouths; they looked irredeemably ablaze.
The ice that covered the street and pavements was worn
and pockmarked. Old and unlovely, it had encased in the first
winter freeze many months earlier scraps of litter and discarded bottle tops, and had imprisoned swirls of dark, muddy rain
water. On the corners of buildings, crystal icicles thick as a
man's arm plugged the exits of downpipes. Sivas was birdless,
a place, in spite of its two hundred thousand inhabitants and
the knot of buildings at its heart, that felt as arid and lonely asthe steppes on every side. Desolation breezed through like
spinifex tumbling down a New Mexico main street, mocking
man's attempts to make it his own.
But man was here, and had been so for centuries. And in
Sivas, he had built monuments between the eleventh and
thirteenth centuries of such beauty that it was almost as if the
civilizing power of that beauty alone had halted the desiccating
march of the steppe. Now, however, those centuries were
long gone, and Sivas was once more huddled down in her
concrete redoubt, cowering at the expanses that surrounded it.
The birds that returned here every summer from Syria and
Tunisia - old outposts of the Ottoman Empire - found last
year's nesting sites lost among fresh winter falls of broken
masonry.
Ever since the decline of the Selcuks, in fact, the masonry
of Anatolia had been breaking up. Like a neglected inner city,
the geographical core of the Ottoman Empire fell into dereliction,
and nobody cared. During the five hundred years of their
pre-eminence, the Ottomans lavished their pride on Constantinople
and other far-flung jewels in their possession, Aleppo
and Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. Perhaps it was of no
consequence to them that the Imperial heartlands were fast
becoming wasteland when vast expanses of Empire lay
beyond. Indeed, to have fostered the Anatolian and Turkish
core would have undermined the Empire's wider territorial
legitimacy - predicated on quite another instinct, the commonality
of Islam. Consequently, as the Anatolian hinterland was
neglected, so its cultural heritage was buried amongst the
forgotten ruins of the peoples who had once settled it.
The time came, of course, that the declining Ottoman
Empire so mislaid or surrendered those distant territorial
jewels that it was reduced once more to its Anatolian beginnings.
The birds that returned for the summer now came from
lands governed by others. When Ataturk and his beleaguered
aides inherited Anatolia, the sparse local population needed
convincing that such a place even existed. 'We fight forTurkey, for Anatolia,' Ataturk's battle cry may have sounded.
'You what?' will have been the bemused reply; it was hard to
devote oneself to a national ideal when one did not even
recognize the nation in question. Upon the reclamation of so submerged a consciousness, then, the very survival of Turkey
depended.
Atattirk set out to restore the Anatolian ideal in Sivas,
ancient capital of the Selcuks. These nomads from the east had
settled here in the eleventh century. Turkish nationalist thinking,
which had succeeded the cosmopolitan empire-building
ideas of the Ottomans, energetically promoted the forgotten
Selcuks as the original Turks, the forefathers of twentieth
century Anatolians. With the Selcuks reinstalled, the seeds of a
venerable Turkish genealogy were sown. The rallying standard
of Turkish resistance might now be raised.
As it was, the Selcuks were perfect for Ataturk's purposes.
Early Turks they might have been, but they were also the
blueprint for modern Turks as Atattirk envisaged them. Seven
hundred years earlier, their civilization had been founded on
many of the same beliefs that would inform Ataturk's own
version of twentieth-century Turkey. They encouraged commerce,
education, and the arts. Their centres of learning specialized in sciences such as mathematics, geometry, astronomy,
and medicine. Theirs was a society that emphasized
rational progress.
Furthermore, Sivas itself had excellent Republican credentials.
Unlike Constantinople, Sivas was not tarred by the brush of Ottoman sloth and conniving. Like Ankara, destined to
become the young country's new capital, it was an untainted
city of the steppe. The Gazi convened a conference at Sivas in
late 1919 where the ideal of Turkish unity and nationhood was expressed and fleshed out. By so doing, Atattirk singled out
the steppe people of Sivas and central Anatolia as the true
representatives of the Turkish national birthright. During the
War of Independence, they were among his most staunch
supporters. A mere six years later, when he hanged them forwearing fezzes, the people of Sivas rejected him. I wondered
whether he had ever got them back.
That January morning the Sifahiye medrese, a Selcuk medical
school, surrounded by largely unconvincing attempts at civic
parkland, rang to the sound of workers as they chipped away
at the icepack with the bluntened edges of their shovels. One
of the outstanding buildings of the Selcuk period, the medrese comprised an enclosed, arcaded courtyard whose engraved and
patterned stonework was of considerable complexity and
beauty - walls and arches of interlacing designs where vines,
stylized scallops, and a host of other motifs formed a multidimensional
brocaded illusion. I looked at the medrese, found
myself following the logic of a single pattern, and was drawn
irresistibly to those with which it was interlinked so that I
soon lost my way and my beginnings in the sculpted, exotic
brilliance of it all.
The art of the medrese led me to imagine a nomadic people
coming at last to rest, settling down. The building struck me
as a declaration of residence, a distillation of all the Selcuks had
absorbed on their progress through the civilizations of the east,
the jackdaw education of a people moving, moving, leaving
few traces until they arrived and built as if- now that they had
shed their nomadic skin for the very last time - they and their
kind might last for ever. On the example of their reclaimed
ancestors, Atattirk had hoped, the Anatolians might build
themselves a twentieth-century nation.
Within the medrese, vaulted chambers led off the arcade on
all sides. They had become the haunts of carpet dealers and of
trinketeers, frequented by scrawny cats, where copper bowls,
mohair socks, postcards, and keyrings were displayed. There
were even fezzes stacked on shelves, but they were evidently
for the few summer tourists; tamed and anodyne as they were,
I doubted that anybody would be inspired to hang for this
tawdry batch.
A tiny man with bright black eyes and curly hair under atight skull cap was watching me from the doorway of his
carpet shop.
'Come,' he said, kissing me on both cheeks and leading me
into his shop. 'You're looking for carpets?'
'I'm a writer,' I replied.
'Ah,' he murmured. 'Looking for ideas. Ideas are more
difficult.' And he laughed heartily and hugged me. Semih
would prove to be the most tactile carpet seller I had ever
encountered.
He too was a writer. When not selling carpets or hugging
people, Semih was in Iran studying Islamic society, and had
written several books on the subject.
'You have read the Koran?' he asked me.
'No,' I admitted.
'I have,' he replied. 'I have also read Marx, Mao, Lenin,
the Bible, Foucault, Sartre, and Bentham. The Koran is the
best. You will drink tea?'
I nodded. 'You think an Iranian-style Islamic society is the
answer for Turkey?' I asked him.
Semih's laugh was explosive and I was almost knocked
from my pile of carpets by the accompanying hug.
'You people are scared of such things! But you know there
are churches and synagogues in Iran. There are Christians and
Jews. There's religious freedom. There's nothing to be afraid
of.'
As he spoke, I found myself composing a sceptic's collage
of images including the veil, an alcohol ban, hostages taken in
the name of Allah, and Salman Rushdie and Ugur Mumcu.
'And will it happen here, Semih?'
He didn't hug me this time. He looked at me instead with
an absolute conviction. 'Islam is rising,' he said, his hands
separating as if to describe an increasingly exaggerated fish.
'Islam is rising here in Sivas, and in cities like Konya, Erzurum,
Diyarbakir, and Tokat. It will come,' he pronounced. 'Maybe
it will take ten years. But it will come.''And it will come with an alcohol ban? With Koranic law?
With fezzes?'
'With what?' he exclaimed, and the ensuing hug actually
threw me clear of the carpets and rolled us across the floor.
Bodyguards generally do this in the instant before a pattern of
bullet-holes is stitched across one's front. By contrast Semih
was merely being expressive. He helped me to my feet and
dusted me down.
'An alcohol ban, yes. Koranic law, yes. Fezzes, no. No no
no. The Koran is clear on alcohol. The Koran is clear on
Koranic law. The Koran says nothing about fezzes. I interpret
the Koran to discourage brimmed hats but you see that around
you already in skull caps like mine. And you'll see turbans.'
'But why not the fez?' I insisted. 'Good Muslims died for
the fez, were imprisoned for the fez in Sivas just sixty-five
years ago. Don't you owe it something?'
'Good Muslims they may have been but they were also
reactionary old fools. The fez, you see, stands for so many
things. Islam, yes, but it also means the time of empire and it's
for this reason that good liberals like me don't want it back.
When Ataturk banned the fez, he was certainly attempting to
undermine Islam but he was also distancing his new republic
from the vestiges of empire.'
'Do you therefore approve of Ataturk?'
'I admire him for his republicanism. I object to his attempts
to undermine Islam. But we shall put that right. We have been
putting that right since the man died.'
The man had died in 1938. Until then, the rising tide of
democracy had lapped at Turkey but had been held in abeyance
by Ataturk's iron grasp on the country. Democracy would
come, but meanwhile Ataturk had demonstrated to those who
might otherwise have opposed him that largely benign dictatorship
of the kind he practised was best suited to Turkey, a
country in radical transition. One way or another, the opposition
was soon enough convinced of this.
In the aftermath of Ataturk's death, however, the democratic tendency rapidly gained strength. Suddenly, politicians
found themselves responding to two contradictory stimuli.
On the one hand was the recent memory of Atattirk and his
ideological legacy - chiefly secularism; on the other was
democracy. In the fast-track learning process (multi-party
democracy was adopted in Turkey in 1945) politicians quickly
came to understand that promising to extend religious freedoms
meant votes and led to power in Turkey. Nodding
regularly at the memory of Atattirk was important too, but
nodding was sufficient.
Such is democracy. Upholding the honoured secular principles
of the republic confounded the democratic process since
the people, without even thinking to criticize their beloved Atattirk, voted for re-Islamicization whenever it was proposed.
Islam quickly emerged as the outstanding electoral carrot.
Gradually, vote-seeking politicians picked at the secular edifice.
In 1947, a law restricting religious teaching in schools was
lifted. A foreign exchange law was passed giving priority to
those who needed it for the express purpose of making the haj to Mecca. In 1950, the call to prayer was once more permitted
to be made in Arabic, the traditional language of Islam, rather
than Turkish. Over the years the secular education system was
gradually eroded until a period in the 1980s when Islamic
education was made compulsory for all students in Turkey,
even the non-Muslims among them. Now, vocational religious
schools turn out some fifty thousand young Islamic priests a
year, guaranteeing a massive oversupply that even the extensive
mosque-building programme in Turkey cannot absorb, and so
resurgent religious sentiment spills over and on to the streets.
In the city of Konya there were attempts in the late eighties
to introduce segrated bus services for men and women. In
1991, the Byzantine basilica of Aya Sofya - originally Christian,
then converted into a mosque by the Ottomans, and then
deconsecrated as a museum by Atattirk in 1935 - was once
again granted the right to hold religious services, and the call
to prayer could once more be heard from its minarets.In Urfa, the town in south-eastern Turkey which Atattirk
had prefixed as Glorious after the Independence War, the Refah
party mayor spent much of 1989 converting churches into
mosques, banning alcohol in public places, and closing down
fourteen of the town's fifteen cinemas.
In the same year, the country's devout Muslim President,
Turgut Ozal, ordered that Turkish flags be dipped in deference
to the Iranian Ayatollah on the occasion of his death. It was
reported that the Turkish flag flew at half mast outside
NATO's headquarters in Brussels where embarrassed Turkish
officials were simultaneously encamped, lobbying to join the
EC. A cinema in Ankara stopped screening the harmless
nonsense movie Naked Gun after threats were received from
Islamic elements objecting to the depiction of the Ayatollah
sporting a punk haircut.
The Islamic resurgence in Turkey is spearheaded by Refah.
Bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, the party can actually deliver on
its promises to construct not only mosques but also hospitals
and schools. The disaffected suburbs and forgotten backwaters
where Ataturk's promises of progress, education, and acceptance
by Europe sound increasingly hollow are a fertile breeding
ground for Islamic revivalism.
Nobody was surprised when Refah took Sivas province in
the general elections of 1991 with some 35% of the vote. At
the local elections a year later, Refah's average vote right across
the country rose to an unprecedented 25%. When Semih had
said ten years, he was not exaggerating the size of the Islamic
fish.
Just as Semih was leaving to see some business acquaintances
who, I imagined, were already bracing themselves in
anticipation of his arrival, two young men wandered into his
shop. They were dressed in that Turkish sartorial no-man's
land, fatally stranded by an attempt to convey two conflicting
impressions at once. Their jeans and T-shirts suggested the
strutting young blade, while their aged pinstripe jackets aimed
at the impression of worldly businessmen. Needless to say, thegirls would laugh at the jackets, the business associates at the
T-shirts.
One of them shook my hand, offered me a cigarette,
introduced himself as Irfan, and sat down. Guardedly, his
friend held back.
'You're a Christian?' Irfan asked me, and I nodded.
'You're happy?'
I nodded again.
'Islam,' he declared without preamble, 'is better than
Christianity because it came five hundred years later. It's an
improvement on your religion.'
'You mean it's better because it's newer?'
He nodded. I frowned. Just because his T-shirt was brand
new didn't change the fact that a cryptic English message
'Luxury Travel Kit - Rowing Club' was emblazoned upon it,
and it was hideous. But I knew enough about Turks to know
that I should not offend Irfan's T-shirt. Instead, I declared that
just because Jim Jones had set up shop in Guyana some fifteen
hundred years after the Prophet was no guarantee, as the
Paraquat amply proved, of a quality spiritual product.
'You are not being serious,' Irfan replied with a slight
smile, but with a smile nevertheless, which compared favourably
with the stony countenance of his friend.
'Our book, the Koran, never changes,' the friend pronounced.
'The rules are the rules and we stick to them.'
I took the silence that followed as a cue to respond in kind.
'Our book never changes,' I said, 'but we interpret it
differently as time passes.'
'To suit yourselves?'
'To suit the times,' I replied. 'Do you drink?'
He looked shocked; drinking was forbidden. Irfan smiled.
'Sometimes I am a bad Muslim and drink raki,' he conceded
graciously.
Thank God, I thought, and turned to his friend. 'You
smoke.'
'Of course,' he said. 'It is not forbidden.''But it is as bad for you as drink.'
'But you smoke too.'
'But not because my God allows me to. Because I am a
fool.'
'Everybody is a fool without Allah,' he replied, running
his bracelet of prayer beads between his fingers.
I was beginning to sympathize with the missionary's
opinion of these upside-downest people. I persevered, intent
only on convincing the friend that his arguments, and not his
religion, were blather.
'Why does the Koran forbid drinking?' I asked him.
'It makes you feel bad. It is not good for you.'
'And if there had been cigarettes, especially Turkish cigarettes,
at the time of the Koran, do you not think your book
would have banned them? So, you have a problem which you
solve by updating the book, which is not to say you change it.
You don't offend Allah by adapting to new problems that He
cannot have foreseen.'
'Allah foresees everything,' the friend pronounced.
'All right,' I said. 'Pork.'
'Haram,' the friend fired back: forbidden.
'And why?'
'Bad microbes,' he replied cautiously.
'At that time, microbes, yes. It was hot; there were no
fridges but now you have fridges . . .'
'Of course we have fridges. We are very modern in Sivas.'
'So eat pork!'
'It is forbidden.'
We were into a serious tailspin towards mutual resentment.
I reminded myself how much they had to resent. Since Ataturk's reforms, the Turks have been obliged to observe the
Christian weekend and to live their lives by an alien calendar
predicated on a principally Christian birth, whose miraculous
nature they seem to find inherently offensive. They also resent
the fact that the infidels dare to use the name of their country
to describe the traditional mainstay of the feast that celebratesthat birth, which just so happens to be an extremely ugly bird.
The French steer clear of insult - if only in Turkey - by
looking further east to name the turkey after India, a practice
copied, not surprisingly, by the Turks. Perhaps, I mused, I
should have been French, but soon thought better of it.
As it was, I was in for the full works.
'Kaptan Koostow,' said the zealot, punching out the syllables
as if to pronounce the death sentence on Christianity.
'Kat Stevens, Anthony Quinn, Kristopher Kolumbus.' This
was missionary Islam's role of honour; those famous names
who, along with a number of servicemen and women in the
course of the Gulf War, had turned to Allah.
I wished them well, I replied, tried to think of celebrated
converts to Christianity, could only come up with Salman
Rushdie, and wisely decided against enlisting him in my
defence. Along with a guidebook in which the existence of
Kurds in the country had been controversially noted, secular
Turkey had banned The Satanic Verses in 1989.
'But people in Turkey are free in principle to convert to
Christianity if they so wish?' I put to the zealot.
A stab of outrage passed across his face. 'No, no,' he
replied, wagging his finger. 'No, no, no.' We had arrived at
the non-negotiable point where Islam finally rejects the West,
certain of its superiority.
Irfan had been closely examining the weave of a carpet. I
assumed by so doing he was abstaining from the argument.
But he soon put me right.
'Muslims cannot come to Christianity, with its tolerance of
abortion and contraception,' he said. 'Christianity is full of
wrongs.'
I tried one more time, suggesting that population control,
even one as radical as abortion, was to the good of mankind if
the option was massive overpopulation and the famines and
conflicts that invariably attended it. 'All we know,' said Irfan
with finality, 'is that it is not for us to give and take life, but
for Allah. Very few babies are being born in the West, Ibelieve. Here, we are always having babies. This makes us the
future, this makes us powerful.'
From sweet Irfan, this was intimidating indeed, religious
dogma co-opted to feed the notion of a weak, infertile and
unpeopled West submitting to the irresistible virility of Islam.
The friend administered the coup de grace. 'You say you are
happy. No, you think you are happy. You would be happier
with us.'
Not in your T-shirt, I mused, abandoning myself to
frustrated insult. 'You are trying to convert me,' I told him;
turning me Turk.
'No,' he smiled unctuously. 'Nothing of the sort. You will
come of your own free will.'
A shiver ran through me. 'You are cold,' he replied in a
marked change of mood that signalled a welcome return to
Turkish courtesies. 'Let me bring you some tea.'
And after the shiver, the echo that had caused it; I was
reminded of the words I had read only that morning. With
considerable difficulty, I had scaled the ice-bound steps of the
Sivas Museum, housed in the building where Ataturk's Conference
of 1919 had taken place. Words of his appeared on a
plaque. 'In my opinion,' they read, 'a dictator is one whose
will dominates the people. As for me, it is my wish to rule not
through breaking hearts but by winning them.' In his words
and those of the young zealot was the common belief that their
will was the general will. The truth, they each seemed to
believe, only needed explaining. But apparently there were
two truths, and like Turkey itself they were faced in opposite
directions. And in the ice of the long Sivas winter, they had
set hard.
The Sivas Museum was not up to much. In fact, most
interesting was the unintended glimpse into an office where a
man was sitting behind a desk. He was holding the pennant of
an Istanbul football club called Fenerbahce in one hand while
his other brandished a comb which he ran lovingly through
the pennant's tassles.The tiniest gesture can trigger a range of memories and
associations, and in this case that single combing action carried
me to the streets of nineteenth-century Turkey, streets filled
not with today's shoeshine boys, but with tassle-combers kept
constantly busy. For fez tassles, traditionally made of unspun
silk, were constantly entangled by the effects of wind, rain,
and dust. Was this a fossilized gesture from the past, turning
up in a fezless world to ensure that the man behind the desk
might one day rise effortlessly to Paradise, he and the entire
squad of the Fenerbahce football team?
I considered this for a while before deciding it was more
likely couch indolence, the filling of time. For the museum
man's desk had been immaculate. Work drifted in as rarely as
winter sunlight, lingered briefly and moved on after a cursory
phone call, a dictated memo. Similarly, the table tops in the
foyer of my hotel, had been covered by pieces of bubbly
transparent plastic packaging cut precisely to size. When I
fingered them in my own spare time, I noticed that not a
bubble was intact. There was time in Sivas to run prayer beads
endlessly between fingers and to track down every plastic
packaging bubble, and pop them one by one to ease the slow
passing of the hours.


Five months later, on July 2 1993, my hotel register in Sivas
would be marked by the entries of a group of Turkish
intellectuals and poets who had booked in while taking part in
a summer arts festival. But the presence of the group, clearly
identified with the secular left wing, irritated the city's Islamic
community. When it was revealed that among the visitors was
a well-known author, who had published inflammatory sections
of The Satanic Verses to demonstrate his support for the
principle of free speech, the city's Muslims were incensed.
After Friday prayers, they marched on the cultural centre,
recited from the Koran, burnt the statutory American flag, and
then headed for the hotel. They torched cars outside and thenset light to the hotel lobby. The register, and many of those
who had scribbled their entries in it earlier that day, burnt
with the hotel. Later, thirty-six corpses were found among the
wreckage, some of them with bullet wounds. Among the
protesters, it struck me, were doubtless the grandchildren of
the fez wearers of 1925, responding to a similar provocation
by the godless but this time leaving thirty-six charred and
bullet-ridden corpses among the ruins of my hotel. The city's
mayor had stood at their head then; now he was seen assaulting
the Turkish publisher even as that man clambered terrified
from the burning building.
History had repeated itself, perhaps so that its message
might be heard; the Turks of Sivas were set in opposite
directions.chapter eight

'To remove the head-dress of whatever kind is, in the
East, an act of discourtesy; to strike it off is a deep
insult.'
- Encyclopaedia Britannica


In early January 1928, an apology headed 'Turkish Formal
Dress - does not comprise a fez' appeared in the New York
Times. A Washington dispatch describing the New Year
reception at the White House had included an inflammatory
reference to the 'long gold embroidered coats with bright
green fez' worn by the Turkish Embassy staff. The affronted
Turkish Ambassador had fired off a letter to the editor of the
newspaper in which he pointed out that the fez was not green
and, anyway, had been abolished in Turkey several years
earlier. 'Our only uniform,' he fumed, 'is the frock coat or
black morning coat. It was in this that we appeared at the
White House, I and the personnel of the Embassy.'
The New York Times stood corrected. The paper had
offended the Ambassador not only by associating modern
Turkey with the fez but by describing that hat as green, the
traditional colour of Islam and of the turbans that priests and
other Turks who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca customarily
wore around their fezzes. It had dressed modern Turkey
in the wardrobe of religious reaction.
The apology, however, only served to mire the paper more
deeply by suggesting that the confusion arose from the fact that
members of the Egyptian Legation had worn the tarboosh at the
reception while the Persians had worn the kullah, which both
happened to resemble the fez. For the Ambassador, the representative
of a country which regarded itself as modern, secular,and above all nationalist, being confused with Arabs and
Persians was hardly better than being presumed to wear a fez.
In fact, the resemblances were beyond dispute. The tarboosh was essentially no more than the Arabic version of the fez. But
it was from the histories, of both the tarboosh and the Iranian kullah, that the most striking parallels with the fez emerged
before these two hats followed its lead into the fancy-dress
basket of history.
For centuries, neighbouring Persia was the Ottoman
Empire's greatest rival. Sultan and Shah tended to view each
other with profound mistrust, mainly because of their respective
claims to pre-eminence within the Islamic hierarchy.
Persia, which had never fallen under Ottoman control, was fez
free. The national kullah was a fleece hat, which actually shared
the most obvious similarities with the kalpak. Come the late
1920s, however, the Shah was quite ready to Westernize by
hat, after the example of Ataturk's Turkey.
First, the Shah replaced the kullah with a peaked hat similar
to the French kepi, and called it the Pahlavi after the dynasty
that bore his name. In 1933 the army spearheaded sartorial
reforms, just as it had in Turkey, by adopting a cap of more
conspicuously Western design. In 1934, the Shah ordered road
labourers in the government's employ to wear a full brim, a
degree more Western than the peak. Besides, claimed the Shah,
just as Mahmud II had done a century earlier, brims offered
better protection from the sun.
In 1935, the Shah announced that all ministers, deputies,
and officials discard the Pahlavi in place of European headgear
and adopt the attendant custom of doffing the hat in salutation
and upon entering a building.
But, just as in Turkey, it was the ordinary citizens who
were subjected to the greatest humiliations. In his journey
through Iran and Afghanistan in 1933 and 1934, the basis of
the classic travel book The Road to Oxiana, the traveller and
writer Robert Byron encountered Iranian men wearing homemade peaks fashioned from old cardboard boxes attached to
their kullahs.
They perhaps had the worst of it, however, in Afghanistan
where the fez was not introduced until the beginning of the
twentieth century. But barely had his people got used to this
belated innovation that Habibullah Khan was confusing them
further by moving on to tweeds, and taking up golf. His son,
Amanullah, who took over in 1919, continued with his father's
fast-track policy. By 1928, he had kitted his wife out in cloche
hats and short skirts. His introduction of the bowler hat was
the last straw, and Amanullah was soon deposed. 'The local
officials have learnt,' wrote Robert Byron in May 1934, 'thanks
to Amanullah's bowler, that the people they seek to inspire
with it are still prepared to fight before throwing away
tradition for a mess of technical pottage.'
In Egypt, the tarboosh had originally been adopted several
decades before Turkey, but its use was reinvigorated there and
throughout the Middle East by the imperial endorsement of
Mahmud II. When Atattirk banned it in Turkey, the tarboosh experienced a surge of popularity in Egypt on the back of
Islamic and anti-republican reaction. Egyptian college students
who had formerly persisted with turbans finally forsook them
for the tarboosh.
But the tarboosh's high standing in Egypt could not protect
it on overseas duty in Turkey, as an Egyptian minister called
Hamsa Bey discovered to his cost. At an official government
banquet in Ankara on October 29 1932, the ninth anniversary
of the founding of the republic, Atattirk espied the befezzed
minister among the crystal and the cigarette smoke. From this
moment in the proceedings, accounts differ. According to one,
the Gazi took exception and dispatched a message to Hamsa
Bey on a silver salver which read, 'Tell your king I do not like
his uniform.' Hamsa Bey promptly left the reception.
The Turkish government, fearful of a diplomatic furore,
countered with its own version of the incident. It claimed thatas all the guests were in official uniform, Hamsa Bey had
observed protocol to the letter in wearing his fez. 'In the course
of the evening,' the release explained, 'the Gazi, seeing that the
Egyptian Minister was feeling the heat, suggested from
entirely friendly motives that he should remove his fez. The
Minister gladly complied with the suggestion. No offence was
intended and none was taken.' The Turkish explanation,
however, for the Minister's sudden and undisputed departure
-- 'The fear that other members of the diplomatic corps might
misinterpret the motive which had prompted the removal of
his fez' - was hardly convincing.
Furthermore, this interpretation of the incident only seemed
to spawn more sensational versions, such as that which alleged
that when Hamsa Bey had bowed in front of Atattirk, the
President had actually sent the man's fez flying with the back
of his hand.
Whatever the truth, it is known that Hamsa Bey reported
the incident to Cairo, which lodged a formal protest. For a
slur upon the tarboosh was deemed a tilt against the old order
and the monarchy at its head. Egyptian Kings Fouad and
Farouk's championing of the tarboosh betrayed an intuitive
awareness of the imminence of their own demise. Shortly after
Farouk was finally overthrown on July 23 1952, Naguib,
Nasser's forerunner, presented himself in front of the people
without a tarboosh. No Egyptian leader had attempted such a
thing for a hundred and fifty years.
Although Nasser never legislated against the tarboosh among the civilian population, he did what he could to
discourage it. His Pan-Arab socialist regime branded the tarboosh as a vestige of the Ottoman Empire, an unwelcome
reminder of Egypt's former vassal status. As in Turkey thirty
years earlier, the religious authorities were put to work digging
up ancient fatwas, or pronouncements, which deemed it to
be perfectly acceptable for Muslims to wear hats or caps
without offending either religion or country. The tarboosh, the
newspapers claimed, symbolized reactionary fanaticism. InSeptember 1952, the Ministry of Finance ordered its employees
to abandon the tarboosh. The police adopted a beret. A commission charged to examine national costume suggested
replacing the tarboosh and jellabaa -- the standard Egyptian
cotton robe - with European hat and suit.
Iran, Egypt, and Afghanistan had gone the way of Turkey,
introducing brims and throwing out fezzes or their equivalents
in their frantic haste to Westernize. Now Iran was an Islamic
republic, Egypt was under increasing threat from her Islamic
fundamentalists, and Afghanistan was embroiled in a civil war
in which the secularists and the Islamic fundamentalists were
lined up against each other in the wake of the Soviet occupation.
Tinkering with fezzes, it seemed, could only lead to
trouble. Would Turkey go the way of such countries?
'What chance,' I would ask a British journalist specializing
in Turkey several months later in Istanbul, 'an Islamic revolution
in Turkey?' He thought a moment, 'Twenty years,' he
replied. It was at least an improvement on Semih's ten.chapter
nine





I'd been intending to head further east, for east was the
pioneering point of the Turkish compass, the romantic's
bearing. East was where one went as naturally as birds flew
south. The difference of course was that birds did their flying
in the autumn, and in travelling east at this time of year I was
proposing a reverse migration towards temperatures that
might conceivably kill me.
Semih shared my concerns. 'East?' he exclaimed. 'To
Erzurum, twelve hours away by train, two thousand five
hundred feet higher into the mountains than here? You don't
want to go to Erzurum at this time of year,' he assured me.
'Fill a fridge with mud and stick your head in it for six months.
That's Erzurum in the winter.' According to the weather
reports, temperatures in Erzurum currently varied between
-- 12° and -- 300 Celsius. Which meant that Semih was not
entirely right about fridges. The fridge, positively mild by
comparison, was where you went to get warm in Erzurum.
There had even been times in Sivas when the fridge had struck
me as a pretty attractive kitchen appliance. In spite of the lack
of wind, the temperatures were such that bank notes buried
deep in my wallet would emerge crinkly with cold, tens of
thousands of deep-frozen lira with their images of Atattirk
chilled to the touch when I peeled them off to pay for cigarettes
or lunch. I decided against heading east.
Once I'd revised my plans, I returned to Semih's shop to
say goodbye. 'Yozgat,' I announced, 'I'm going to Yozgat.'
He responded with an incredulous hug that seemed to expel,for ever, what little air remained in my ice-seared lungs and
left me gasping among the carpets.
'Why?' he asked me once I had recovered.
Sensing I had chosen in advisedly, I gave the practical
reason; all the other roads were closed by snow.
Semih considered my predicament for a moment. 'You
could always take the train to Erzurum, you know.'
So something was severely wrong with Yozgat. In fact,
that had already become part of its perverse attraction; the
sheer ugliness of that country town's name alone merited a
visit. There was also the vaguely remembered quote from a
nineteenth-century traveller's account which threw an
intriguingly unlikely cast over Yozgat life: 'There was a great
deal of immorality amidst the fair sex in Ankara although
nothing to what existed in Yozgat.' (And this from an Italian
doctor of the time, no slouch in the immorality stakes.)
But Semih dashed my expectations. 'Yozgat,' he told me,
'is known as the Castle of the Racists. It is the home of Mr
Turkes, the Turkish Hitler.' He observed me closely, with
undisguised concern. 'You're not Armenian, are you?' Not so
much short skirts, then, as brown shirts.
The bus left Sivas in a snatched hour of bright sunshine.
Patches of bone-dry grass poked through the snow blanket
and a thin hawk, reckless with hunger, swooped down for an
improbable second look at us, the only movement on the
dormant landscape below him. Evidently, his hunger had
not yet driven him to Mercedes buses. I watched his wing
patterns, striations of browns against the blue sky, before he
turned away to pick at his own plastic bubbles until spring
came.
From what Semih had told me, Yozgat was a farming
community of about forty thousand souls deep in the Turkish
steppe. Refah and Mr Turkes' extreme right Nationalist Action
Party, I had learned, had formed a coalition in the last election
to unite Islam and Turkish nationalism under one effectivevote-winning banner. They had done well nationwide, but
best of all in Yozgat, where the coalition party had won the
seat with about 40% of the vote. The Turkish Hitler was
Yozgat's MP.
It may have been a racist's town but to call Yozgat a castle
was generous in the extreme. A castle would have transformed
Yozgat. Instead, there were cars buried deep in snow among a
large number of unfinished tower blocks. Arriving at Yozgat
bus station had the powerful effect of sending my imagination
into panic-stricken overdrive so that the destinations brightly
painted on the bus company windows there transmitted messages
of hope and indescribable beauty. I almost cried at the
thought of distant towns I had never seen but felt sure that
they were all I could ever want, home and sanctuary for the
rest of my life after what I had seen of Yozgat.
Only the polite enquiries of two young men prevented me
from leaving Yozgat immediately and for ever. They attached
themselves to me, accompanied me into town, and nursed me
through my crisis. They were very attentive; perhaps,
unknown to me, I had been triumphantly identified as the
town's inaugural overseas tourist. Excepting those unfortunate
enough to call it home, nobody had ever had cause to stop at
Yozgat. When the young men told me they worked at the
town's museum and would be pleased to show me round, I
was tempted in the light of my museum experiences elsewhere
to ask them exactly what did they think they were doing,
being so uncharacteristically amenable.
Night was falling as we walked through the town's icy
streets. Unearthly figures muffled against the cold disappeared
down alleyways carrying translucent purple bags lumpy with
fruit and vegetables. Hacking coughs sounded behind yellow
lit windowpanes. I, who had prepared myself for jackbooted
Turkish supremacists wrapped in white star and crescent on
red background, shorn heads, the cursory lynchings of passing
outsiders, felt strangely let down. It was just an ordinary town
clad in snow and concrete.Omer and Mehmet led me to the museum and showed me
round the few pieces of Hittite masonry plundered from
obscure sites near by, odd articles of early twentieth-century
Anatolian clothing, the reconstruction of Yozgat life from an
indeterminate period in the town's history. Then they offered
me tea in an office so small that the three of us shared the only
creaking desk and I was forced to dangle my legs in the
wastepaper bin. Omer emptied it for me before thoughtfully
returning it upside-down so that I might rest my feet on it.
They took up positions either side of me, small, studious men
who reminded me vividly of barn owls.
Yozgat seemed so removed from the outside world that I
half expected the young men to ask for an update on what had
been going on out there beyond the outskirts of the town.
What of this band called the Beatles? Americans on the moon?
Just how is the twentieth century? Mehmet's actual question
was far more direct. 'Bosnia,' he said. 'What do you think of
Bosnia?' The question was simple, but laden with outrage.
And by turning on Turkish television at almost any time I
would have understood the feeling, those countless images of
a broken and burned-out Sarajevo that have left the Turks
despairing and vengeful; the bombed-out mosques and teetering
minarets that date from the times when Bosnia was an
Ottoman province, serving to reinforce the links not only of
religion but also of empire. Wisely, I allowed Mehmet to
answer his own question. 'You Christians in the West do
nothing,' he said bitterly. 'You let the Christian Serbs kill our
people, murder and rape our women and children. Yet you
allow the Muslims no weapons, people who would never
think of killing or raping women and children.'
'Never ever consider such a thing,' Omer emphasized
Mehmet's words with a large gesture of the hand.
'I am not responsible for state decisions,' I replied. Sometimes
you have to lie in situations like this.
They ignored my facetiousness. 'You bomb in Iraq, but you
do nothing in Bosnia. And you know why?' Mehmet asked me.'Oil,' Omer replied for me, somehow finding a small
section of available desk to thump in emphasis. 'For what do
the West have to worry about in poor old Sarajevo?'
'Yes, you tell us what,' Mehmet challenged me. The way
they worked was like a conversational co-operative.
I'll tell you what the West have to worry about in poor old
Sarajevo, I told them. Over the years, the West has learned a
few major history lessons in Sarajevo, most recently the one
in 1914 which it is unlikely to forget. It knows that the Balkans
are a tinderbox, I told them. It is doubtless aware of the
dangers of Turkey coming to the aid of the Bosnian Muslims.
It knows that Turkish involvement would be likely to provoke
overt Russian support for the Serbs, not only because of the
historical ties between Serbs and Russian Slavs but also because
of the parallels with the situation on Turkey's eastern border
where the war between Christian Armenia and Muslim Turkic
Azerbaijan compels Russian and Turkish support respectively.
Thinking I'd really told them, I leaned back, quite forgetting
myself, and was only saved from falling off the desk backwards
by the quick reflexes of two Yozgat museum assistants. The
moment of persuasion was lost, my argument torpedoed by
the ridiculous, and my saviours did not look impressed.
'Send in soldiers,' intoned Mehmet.
'To Bosnia,' Omer confirmed.
'We will not stand for it much longer,' Mehmet announced.
'We have had enough,' Omer confirmed.
'Furthermore, we will be at the rally at Taksim Square in
Istanbul next week,' Mehmet said.
'Yes, we will,' added Omer.
'Ozal, our President, will be speaking although our Prime
Minister disapproves.'
'Our President will speak."
Four years earlier, it had been the same; just as now, the
President had spoken, the Turks had staged rallies, and had
pressed to send soldiers to another nearby country: Bulgaria.
Since 1984, 'Turkish' enclaves in north-east and southernBulgaria, where some one and a half million Muslims lived,
had been subjected to forced assimilation by the Bulgarians.
Names were forcibly Bulgarianized, mosques and Turkish
schools were closed, and the use of Turkish was punishable by
a fine equivalent to three days' wages.
By the summer of 1989, three thousand refugees a day
were arriving at the Kapikule border post between Bulgaria
and Turkey. Their Lada cars were laden with bedsteads,
furniture and mattresses. They came with stories of beatings,
the desecration of village cemeteries, forced deportations
whereby they had been issued with new red passports and told
in no uncertain terms to make use of them. They had been
forced to surrender wedding rings, valuables, and money on
the Bulgarian side of the border. The Bulgarian authorities had
found a Turkish book during a search of a young man's house.
In spite of his appeals that the book had belonged to his
grandfather and was only a keepsake, he was beaten heavily
before being deported. By the end of July, over a hundred
thousand refugees had arrived to swell the tent city populations
established in western Turkey.
For his part, the Bulgarian Ambassador to Britain explained
away the refugees as a hundred thousand happy tourists.
'According to the new Bulgarian legislation on foreign travel,'
he declared, 'all Bulgarian citizens enjoy complete and unlimited
freedom of movement.' If they don't like the way they are
treated here, in loose translation from the Bulgarian, they can
always bugger off.
Besides, the Bulgarian authorities argued, far from being
the descendants of ethnic Turks who had migrated to Bulgaria
during Ottoman times, these people were actually Bulgarian
Slavs by origin who had been forcibly Islamicized under the
Ottomans. All they were doing, they claimed, was returning
the Ottoman compliment by restoring to people their proper
Bulgarian roots.
But the Muslims of Bulgaria and of Bosnia, whatever the
truth of their forgotten origins, had considered themselvesTurkish, by instinct if not by blood, for hundreds of years. They had been left behind when the Ottoman tide in Europe
had steadily receded between the seventeenth and nineteenth
centuries at the hands of European resurgence and the Empire's
own military and diplomatic failings, rockpools of Turkishness £
above the shoreline of retreat. The writer Patrick Leigh Fermor
had reached an island on the Danube situated at the convergence
of Romania, Bulgaria, and fledgeling Yugoslavia in
1935. The island had a Turkish name which translated as Island
Castle.
The flow of the Danube had insulated it against the
Ottoman retreat so that Island Castle at that time remained an
outpost of undiluted Ottomanism. There were worry beads,
rose-petal jam, nargilye smoking pipes, raki, the emphatically [
Turkish truncated nod of the head to refuse Leigh Fermor's
offer of payment, veils, and fezzes. Faded, plum-coloured
fezzes, as Leigh Fermor described them, 'with ragged turbans
loosely knotted around them'. The hoja's fez was lower and
less tapering, 'with snow-white folds' arranged around it. In this memorable, magical image it was self-evident that these
people too were clear about their genealogies.
'We are all Turks,' said Mehmet.
'All Turks,' insisted Omer vigorously. And yet, despite [
the distinctive community at Island Castle, the Ottomans
would have laughed at such an idea. They were accustomed to referring to themselves not by ethnic background but as
subjects of a multiracial Empire, as Ottomans. Ethnic labels
fell into disuse, and thence to abuse. For much of the Ottoman
period, to describe somebody as a Turk was to invite a punch
in the face. 'A thousand Turks for a radish,' as the saying
went; 'poor radish!' Not since the Vandals had a single ethnic
caste been so vilified. To inspire a wholesale reorientation of
Anatolian thinking on Turks and radishes was no mean feat.
But Turkish stock was soon rising in value, and passing
that of static radishes. As early as 1908, the mystically imbued
idea of a Turkish homeland was being actively bandied aboutin intellectual circles. Although some queried whether the
concept had ever existed, more vociferous voices wondered
how it could have been neglected so long. Dusted down or
simply invented, the Turkish homeland emerged peopled with irresistible historical figures rendered thoroughly Turkish
such as Attila, Genghis Khan, and Tamberlaine. 'These heroic
figures,' wrote Ziya Gokalp, the leading Turkish nationalist
thinker of the time, 'which stand for the proud fame of my
race, appear on the dry pages of the history books as covered
with shame and disgrace, while in reality they are no less than
Alexander and Caesar.'
By the 1920s, Turkish nationalists were actively propagating
notions of Turkishness. They worked to uncover Turkish
equivalents for Arabic names which they then gave their
children, enthusiastically adopted the name Ozturk, or 'Pure
Turk' when surname time came to Turkey, and turned to the kalpak, the hardy hat of the steppe wherein all Turks were
supposed to have their origins.
The more extreme saw the Turkish race as launching the
genealogies not only of all Turkic-speaking peoples, Kazakhs,
Uzbeks, Azerbaijanis, but also of those races - Hungarians,
Estonians, Finns, Bulgars, and Mongols - who are thought to
have originated in the same area as themselves, between the
Caspian Sea and Mongolia. School books current at the time
of Atattirk claimed that the Turks came from a great inland sea
in central Asia which dried up during a drought and so caused
them to become nomads. Consequently, the version went,
they established separate but distinct Turkish civilizations as
far afield as China, India, the Levant, North Africa, and Spain.
This conveniently put the Turks at the heart of most leading
civilizations and also explained why they became nomads,
insisting that they had never been nomadic - a bit primitive,
nomadism - by instinct, but rather by climatic necessity.
Turkish myth-making did not stop at drought. The Turkish
origins are traced to the aftermath of a great massacre;
Turks are the fruit of a mystical union between the last Turkleft alive - and a she-wolf. All that can be said is that stranger
things may have happened on the Anatolian uplands.
To this day, the wolf remains a potent nationalist symbol
for the Turks. When the journalist John Simpson interviewed
the Azerbaijani Minister of the Interior in 1992, he was
singularly disturbed by the presence in the corner of the room
of a complete stuffed wolf which presided over the proceedings
with a lupine malevolence, a bizarre but memorable means of
stressing the ethnic ties purported to exist between Turkey and
Azerbaijan. The two countries' respective flags, only nominally
different versions of the white star and crescent on red
background, only emphasize the point.
What the Minister's wolf served more specifically to do
was align him with the Pan-Turkic extreme right and with the
Grey Wolves, a nationalist terror group responsible for numerous
killings in Turkey's anarchic seventies including the assassination
attempt on the Pope in 1981. The former head of the
Grey Wolves' political wing we have met before. His name is
Mr Turkes, now Yozgat's MP. His choice of surname now
acquires a particular significance.
Wolves, pure Turkish surnames, and Genghis Khan were a
far cry from the tradition of tolerance that the Ottomans
practised upon the Empire's numerous religious and racial
minorities. All were bound by fealty to an Empire which did
not attempt to disguise its complex racial make-up. The
Ottomans would have laughed at wolves, pure Turkish surnames,
and Genghis Khan. And so too would the fez.
When Mahmud II introduced the fez in the 1820s, he
declared the new headgear was intended for all Ottomans,
regardless of race or creed. Under the fez, the people of the
Empire were to be indistinguishable. 'Henceforth,' said
Mahmud II, I recognize Muslims only in the mosque, Christians
only in the church, Jews only in the synagogue. Outside
those places of worship, I desire every individual to enjoy the
same political rights and my fatherly protection.' The fez
encapsulated the ideal of benign cosmopolitanism.'Racial geography is nowhere very simple between Baghdad
and Vienna,' wrote Arnold Toynbee in 1917. While no
Ottoman would have thought to query such an obvious
statement, the Turks in the aftermath of the Great War had no
choice but to claim Anatolia as an exception. For their nation's
very legitimacy rested upon the claim that Anatolia's racial
geography was in fact inherently simple - in that it was
Turkish. To have accepted Toynbee's dictum, to have pursued
a policy of cosmopolitanism, would have been to entertain the
claims of the Armenians and Kurds to most of eastern Anatolia,
and of the Greeks to the west. And so the lie of Turkish
nationalism was born, distilled from the pure instinct to
survive. Like the cornered chess player who resorts to overturning
the board as the only way out, the appeal of such
simplistic nationalism is often irresistible. Chess, interestingly,
is not much played in Turkey. And Turkey, equally interestingly,
is where the Gordian knot was cut.
One of Ataturk's most popular dictums refutes Toynbee
with similar knot-cutting simplicity. 'Happy is He who can
call Himself a Turk' is inscribed across countless Turkish
mountainsides; in spite of which, there are in Turkey millions
of Kurds and, for specific reasons, not so many Armenians,
who do not count themselves happy - and neither they, nor
the mountainsides, Turkish.
Mehmet threw up his hands so that one of his outstretched
fingers buried itself in my left nostril, but not out of anger; it
was simply a peril of desk-sharing.
'We are supplying aid to the Armenians in the east even
though they are fighting our brothers in Azerbaijan,' he
wailed. 'And yet we cannot help the Bosnians.'
'The Bosnians,' Omer confirmed.
Mehmet's eyes narrowed. 'The Armenians and Jews are
the richest people in Turkey. They own all the big businesses,
they have all the opportunities. Why is it?'
Semih's castle was showing through the mist.
'Those of them that are left,' I replied unwisely. And notfor the first time, I was told that the alleged massacres of one
million Armenians in eastern Turkey in 1915 was a lie, an
American-Armenian plot, and a massive insult to Turkish
honour.
'They were trying to move the civilian population out of
the fighting area,' Omer explained. 'It was war, you understand
and, sure, some of them will have died. People die in
war. But nobody was trying to wipe them out.'
'Why would we do that?' Mehmet asked. 'Weren't we the
people who invited the Jews here in the late 1400s when they
were expelled by Christian Spain?'
But you were Ottomans in the late 1400s, and you owned
the world. You could afford to be munificent. But when you
are fighting for a much reduced tract of land, when you are
about to lose everything including the fragile sense of nationhood
that is the only glue binding a new ideal, up goes the
chess board and the pieces are scattered.
It was time for Omer and Mehmet to leave for the mosque.
Religion and race bound these young men to Bosnia and to
Azerbaijan, and made them ill disposed to those people who
were not their own. The fez's attempts to resolve those
diferences had failed and late in the nineteenth century, as the
Ottoman Empire showed signs of imminent collapse, the
Christians and Jews of the Empire were required to sew
identifying strips of black ribbon to their fezzes. It was a
defining moment, a ghastly parody of what the fez had
originally stood for, strips of black ribbon that were perhaps
the harbingers of Armenian massacre and the identification
tattoos of the Nazi death camps.
I thought to raise my spirits with a drink, but a restaurant
waiter told me that they did not generally serve alcohol. They
could probably make an exception and serve me a beer, but
raki was out of the question. And I was not a hundred miles
from Ankara, the city where Atattirk had all but killed himself
with the stuff. I drank ayran instead, a salty yoghurt concoction,
ordered a joyless kebab, and stared out of the window.Everywhere I looked the sticker Huzur Ham'da - Happiness in
Islam - was posted on walls and in car windows. Allah'a
Emanet was painted in decorative yellows and blues across the
tailgates of the local lorries. I knew Emanet to mean 'left
luggage' and it took me a minute to understand that this
apparent reference to Allah's left luggage actually translated as
'In Allah's safe keeping'. That cheered me up. For about two
seconds.
At the back of the restaurant, two men were playing
backgammon, the board perched on a low stool between
them. I watched one of them, an unshaven man with a small
rodent for a moustache who repeatedly raised his hand in fury
at the increasingly unfavourable fall of the dice. Eventually, he
caught the side of the board with his fist and catapulted the
markers into the smoky air. He had opted for the simple
solution.
The bill came to the equivalent of 70p, and was served up
with a flourish on a plastic silver salver. As I headed for a
despairingly early bed and slid wildly on the treacherous ice
getting there, I saw the shadows of several veiled women
moving with surprising ease and balance before the town
statue of Atattirk. All I could think was that Yozgat might one
day produce a very fine skater indeed.
chapter ten

'The origins of the fez, you say? From the penis, of
course. Like your English top hat, it represents the
primal human instinct.'
From a conversation with a Turkish
anthropologist as recorded in my notebook


At Friday lunchtime, the muffled waitings of Yozgat's
muezzins floated across the wintry town and mingled among
the wind-tugged plumes of coal smoke. From the window of
my hotel room, I watched huddled figures streaming towards
the mosques, making fresh tracks through the snow or picking
up the spoor impressions of old ones to guide them safely in.
Every lunchtime, the deskbound hotel receptionist turned
his place of work into a place of prayer, his body into a vessel
of obeisance to the will of God, his mind into a pure conduit
of divine communication, his thoughts towards the Almighty,
all of which he did most assiduously on Fridays. In spite of Ataturk's adoption of the Christian weekend, Friday's religious
significance has endured, and on that day thousands of faithful
foreheads were buffing up desk surfaces in country towns
throughout Turkey, leaving rounded patinas of shiny, reverential
sweat as testament to their devotions.
The receptionist's forehead lay between outstretched palms
upon the counter in front of him. Every so often he would lift
his head a few inches to offer up rhythmic mutterings. And
whenever he did so, I would lean forward with a raised finger
to signal my presence. I was beginning to worry about the
time, and increasingly hoped he was working up to a
devotional climax.
It was the old dilemma: he had a God to talk to; I had a busto catch. I respected his God, but I also knew that the Turks
respected their bus timetables. Perhaps I only imagined the
signs in the gloom of the lobby that read Do not disturb upon
sentence of ritual emasculation by Yozgat's Islamic Tribunal, but
even imagining them convinced me that anything as earthbound
as bill settling would have to wait.
I was running short of patience. I'd had my fill of supine
receptionists, and of being trailed, cornered, and finished off
by hunting pairs of angry young men peddling their confused
Turkish mantras. If only for the weekend, I had decided, it
was time to get Christian. And Yozgat being no place to get
so, I was doing the Christian thing, and fleeing.
When the receptionist finally surfaced, I informed him a
little briskly that I was leaving.
'You're leaving Yozgat?' he asked, eyes narrowing. Didn't
anybody tell you? You can't just come and go in Yozgat; you have to
stay, for ever. In fact, he-asked me for my room key, and where
I was going.
'Church,' I told him.
'Ah,' he said. 'Christian.'
'One of the very best,' I replied, handing over a few bank
notes.
'Perhaps you should think about--'
'Don't,' I interrupted him, and left for Cappadocia.
Cappadocia was the obvious choice. I knew that much
wine was drunk there, and that the Cappadocians played host
to large numbers of wine-drinking tourists. Cappadocia had
churches, four hundred of them. Besides, Christians had been
evading the Turks in Cappadocia for hundred of years.
History's example was enough to prompt this harried Christian
to seek sanctuary there, if only for the weekend.
The long road took us past the country town of Kirsehir
where, a passenger told me, Ugur Mumcu had been born.
From the bus, I could see enough to know that it was exactly
like Yozgat; doubtless, Mumcu had jumped at the first escape
opportunity to present itself. And when we came to a roadblock yards from Kirsehir, I understood what it must feel like,
that cloying web of small-town Turkish life threatening to foil
one's dash for the easy-breathing open spaces of Cappadocia. We won't keep you long, went that sinister gentle reprise inside
my head. Just for eternity.
Palming away the condensation on my window, I could
see beyond the several rows of waiting traffic two shivering
police officers venturing from the warmth of their car. It
became clear, as I watched, that the foray was one of a series
designed to deter the tide of impatient drivers salivating at the
grid as an enticing gap opened up ahead whenever the wind
nudged like minor demented daleks the two traffic cones from
their position, across the icy road surface, and into the ditch.
Repositioning them, the policemen would stare down the
drivers and quieten for a moment the sound of gunning
engines.
After half an hour, one bus driver had had enough. He
climbed down and skated across to the police car. Reluctantly,
a policeman wound him out three inches of window gap
through which to speak.
'You can't leave us here,' the bus driver told them. 'The
weather's only going to get worse - and then our retreat will
be blocked too. Besides, the road's obviously passable.' By
way of illustration, he pointed at the uninterrupted flow of
traffic coming in the opposite direction.
'Listen,' a policeman told him, jabbing up at him through
the window. 'We've been up that road, and we got stuck.'
'That's because you drive crap cars,' the bus driver replied,
turning away in scorn. And the reaction of the four seated
Anatolian policemen was a lurch of barely restrained intent at
his words, and it was as if only the confining space of the car
had halted their avenging reflexes.
A stronger gust of wind blew across the steppe, a snowbound
blast of pure Siberian cold, and the two cones skittered
frantically from the road and disappeared for good into a
snowdrift to an accompanying cheer from the stacked vehicles.In that moment, the policemen's fragile baton of authority was
snapped; the driver turned for his bus with unmistakable
resolve, and engines on all sides growled an appreciative chorus
of anticipation. When he gunned his engine and moved
forward, ten rows of vehicles moved up in unison. The
policemen knew that they had lost, but not that they had
already lost face. As if to hijack credit for the road-opening
decision, all four at once flung open their car doors and took
up frantic waving positions to direct the oncoming traffic
through the breach that the bus driver had made.
They were still waving as we passed and the bus passengers
around me waved gleefully back at them, those forlorn figures
decked out in a uniform of a nauseously rich green and learning
to live with unpalatable concepts such as accountability. Like
the Ottoman Janissaries, ultra-Orthodox guardians of the
Empire, the Turkish police had long operated according to a
code entirely of their own composition, but were now finding
themselves publicly distanced from a disapproving state. When
Siileyman Demirel was elected Prime Minister in 1991, one of
his party's more memorable slogans was Transparency - police
station walls will all be made of glass. People in glass houses, it
might be said, could no longer throw stones, punches or
electric switches with quite the same impunity.
The Turkish police force certainly have some bizarre arrests
to their credit: a sixteen-year-old girl who spent seventy-five
days in prison for hanging an anti-war poster in her school in
1991; a female German tourist who was dragged from her bed
and subjected to a virginity test, which she quite reasonably
failed (apparently, she had been mistaken for a Romanian
prostitute after a tip-off from a rival hotel trying to close down
the competition); and an elderly ex-mayor of Istanbul originally
tried for possession of a weapon - an ornamental musket
decorating his mother-in-law's sitting-room. It was a telling
measure of change in Turkey that you could even insult a
policeman's car these days and get away with it.
Cappadocia began at the town of Avanos where the firstlandscape eccentricities could be seen. The evening light fell
upon a distant skyline, a pinkish range of soft rock meringues.
A red river ran through the town carrying swirls of clay north
to the coast near Inebolu. Unimaginatively, it was called the
Red River. More impressive, however, was the fact that they
had already called one of their roads after Ugur Mumcu, and I
knew then I had put a safe distance between me and Yozgat.
The bus dropped me at the village of Goreme. I found a
hotel, refurbished in the remains of an old merchant's house.
It had been carved from the soft rock in a town where soft
rock, rough carved by the elements and then further customized
by humans, was largely the town itself. There was the
odd implanted construction such as the single minaret or an
occasional whitewashed breeze-block wall. But the rest, as the
last of the evening light performed across an impossible
volcanic landscape, was geological fantasy, and endless cones
perhaps one hundred feet high, the product of lava, wind, and
time that had formed a decidedly priapic landscape. Tourist
brochures have exhausted the lexicon - see under 'Moonscape',
'Haunting', and 'Sculpted' - in their valiant attempts to avoid
the most glaringly obvious adjective. But finally they have
submitted to the inevitable, and 'Phallic' has crept into even
the most prudish of Cappadocian guidebooks.
Christians have never been particularly good with penises but they had taken to Cappadocia in spite of them, these great
knobbed sandstone shafts on every side. To seventh-century
Christians, it must have appeared a very rude landscape indeed.
Could they really settle amongst this geological orgy? They
could and would; the phallic aspect could not be allowed to
dissuade them since, like rabbits, they could dig their way out
of persecution here, and persecution was routine stuff for the
Anatolian Christians of the seventh century. In the countless
underground cities chat have been found in the region they
burrowed to secure themselves, complete with all the requisite
facilities of the early Christians - grain stores, churches,
assembly rooms, wine cellars, and stables - and thumbed theirnoses at the rampaging hordes above. It was presumably an
added relief that the penises were safely out of sight. But there
was more to it, I suspected, than security from marauding
Turks and unseemly priapic totems. The look of the place
distinguished it from the high, interminable steppeland which
the Islamic Turks, hearing echoes there of their own distant
Mongolia, had made their own.
The idea that the Turks remain mystically linked to the
distant land of their origins has done good box office in the
twentieth century as a natural extension of nationalist thinking.
In truth, and despite their claims to the contrary, the Turks do
not seem to like the Mongolian look of their landscape. They
seem happiest in the confines of their towns. They shrink from
the intimidating treeless sweep of the steppe, and the unvarying
duns of its colour palette. They borrow instead the
idealized rural landscapes of others as backdrops to their
dreams. In Turkey's kebab houses, the same repeated images
on large posters are papered to the walls.
Most commonly, there is a verdant mountain scene in
which an eternal late spring has settled -- judging by the lines
of the ubiquitous wooden chalets - somewhere in southern
Germany. I had seen something similar on the calendar two
weeks earlier at Mehmet's house in Soapmakers. Then there is
the little bay by the sea with a few yachts at anchor and a
sprinkling of red-roofed houses, an image on the wall of bus
company waiting-rooms hundreds of miles from the coast.
'The Turk and the Arab came out of big spaces, and they have
the desire of them in their bones,' wrote John Buchan in Greenmantle. On the contrary, it seems to me that Turks are
actually in awe of Anatolia. Far from the desolation of the
steppe, they have the desire in their bones of a smoky crowd,
a gathering after work in the warm, muggy gloom of a good
friend's shop.
The Cappadocian Christians, however, had always loved
their adopted landscape as if its alien geology endorsed and
befitted their alien status. From the hotel terrace, I could see inthe gloaming the neat lines of vines, vegetable patches, and
apple orchards crowded amongst the towering cones. Despite
a geology that was certifiable, Cappadocia's was a tended
landscape. It looked benign, and I felt no qualms the next
morning about leaving Goreme behind and setting off into the
frozen dawn on foot.
It was cloudless. Soft splashes of sunshine fell among the
apple orchards and the spidery-black vines. The earth was
chocolate brown where it showed through the snow. Pink
cones cast long shadows across the road. A silhouetted woman
carrying firewood on her hunched back appeared in the
distance, slipping below the horizon into the shadow of the
road before rising up to pass me, silently habituated to the
pattern of her life. Men, I might have muttered, catching her
eye sympathetically, but she would not have understood my
objection to a division of labour ingrained so deep into the
expectations of her predecessors that the unfairness of it all had
never touched her.
At my back, a horn sounded and I turned to see a man
with a rifle waving at me from the back of an approaching
pick-up. His frantic gestures indicated unmistakably that I
move away. And then I saw the dog, large and black, a
hundred yards away and closing. It was spinning along the
road like a deranged top, sputum draped from its jowls and
arcing from the centrifuge of its sweat-drenched body. Whining
and snapping, it wolfed down great chunks of Cappadocian
sky. I scrambled up the bank, my heels spinning like cartoon
wheels in the fresh snow, clambered past a couple of apple
trees, and raced for the nearest rock cone. The neat doorway
which had once been carved in its base was now eroded on all
sides. I took sanctuary in the gloom of the interior where my
boots crunched on the charcoal remains of an old fire. I could
smell musty stone.
My pulse was racing. I heard the sound of the creature
spinning dementedly between the apple trees, and I gave
myself up to the prospect of an arse punctured not only by anexercised set of canines but also by a subsequent course of
rabies jabs. Only when I heard the shots, four loud reports
amid squeals, whimpers, and silence, did I understand that
what I had heard was the wind, only the wind ruffling the
snow. From the road, I watched the pick-up disappear out of
sight in the direction of Goreme.
Heaven protect me from fanatics and wild dogs, I mused,
as I reached the building at the entrance to the rock churches.
A man stood outside, stripped to the waist and washing in a
bowl of water. He was not the cowled troglodytic guardian
with chunky iron keys swinging from the waist cord that I
had imagined. He towelled himself down, lit a cigarette, and
ushered me inside. Beyond the desk where he issued tickets,
the heap of blankets from which he had recently emerged lay
upon the concrete floor. The whistle of a teapot upon the stove
drowned out the early morning television.
'Eight clock open,' he told me in English, indicating in the
direction of the churches. Since they had been doorless and
open for some twelve hundred years, keeping me waiting until
eight o'clock seemed strictly unnecessary. But I was grateful
for the tea.
'Christian?' he asked me, straightening his moustache in a
small, cracked mirror above the stove.
'Christian. Muslim?'
'Muslim. Country?'
'England.'
'Teacher?'
'No. Major.'
'Ah. Major. Ser-terling?'
'Sterling.' 'How many lira?'
'Fourteen thousand.'
He whistled. 'Rich man. Football?'
'Football.'
'Milano?'
'No. That's Italy. Manchester.''Ah. Manchester. Man-ches-ter-Un-it-ed.'
I told him that I spoke Turkish, and the attendant filled out
as Metin, a good Muslim tending to the relics of Christianity.
I wondered how he felt about that.
'They are beautiful churches,' he replied. 'Christians, Muslims,
it makes no difference to me.' Admittedly, he did not
approve of everything that Christians did. He remembered the
people who had come here from Europe twenty years ago
when he first came to Goreme.
'Heepies,' he called them. 'They came here in the seventies
on the overland route to India and used to camp in the
chimneys and make much love.'
'I can see where they got the idea from,' I replied.
Metin blushed an Islamic red and turned away. 'Only
Christians think like that. We call them fairy chimneys,' he
said coyly. 'Anyway, I do not believe good heepies ever
needed prompting,' he continued, humouring me but changing
the tack of the subject if not the subject itself. I marvelled
that Metin could be so coy, working long days as he did in
one of the most phallic of all valleys, about the penises which
had surrounded him for twenty years.
Yellow sunlight crept in at the window. A single bird sang.
A pat of snow shook itself free of an apple tree. 'OK,' he said,
as the clock eventually struck eight, smiled and set me on my
way. I found the churches secreted among the lips and rumps
of the landscape. Beyond their dark entrances were pillars,
altars, and arches carved from the rock. I rapidly worked my
way through some seven of them; that many stood within two
hundred yards of each other. It was as if the Cappadocian
Christians had built an out-of-town prayer mall in which
parishioners could choose differently frescoed settings for their
worship. In fact, in the moderate size and the proximity of
these churches was contained an inspired ideological resolution.
Early Christianity in Cappadocia was much troubled in
its approach to prayer and its wider implications for the nature
of Christian society. Should it express itself as a community oras a collection of individuals? Should churches encourage
assembly or personal reflection? Should the hermit or the
congregation represent the primary Christian inclination?
In Cappadocia, the resultant compromise was expressed in
the very design of these beautiful churches. They were of a
size and number in which both communal and private
expression might find voice. And although the plaster frescos
were mostly recognizable images from the New Testament the
Nativity, the Marriage at Cana, the Feeding of the Five
Thousand, the Raising of Lazarus, the Crucifixion - the feel of
their execution was in no way textbook. Instead, they had a
fine beauty that felt introspective; these were expressions of an
uninstitutionalized spirituality. Often they were naive, the
iconography of an inchoate, dawning sense of faith drawn in
faded colours simple and earth-bound. And in many cases, a
monstrous intolerance, the frescos had been disfigured.
The faces of saints, Christs, and disciples had been obliterated
with some sharp flint so that a neat oval of rough stone
showed in their place. I felt anger rising inside me, a contempt
for Islamic orthodoxy that doubtless was spurred by my recent
experiences in Sivas and Yozgat. It was the meticulousness of
the desecration that outraged me. I might less have minded an
energetically chaotic violation born of fury, but this was a
knowing perpetration hiding behind a zealot's knowledge of
the rulebook. For does not Islam forbid the depiction of the
human image? For can not God alone create man? Furthermore,
the desecrations had most probably occurred long after
the Christian community in Cappadocia had been dispersed.
The rock churches had been attacked not as symbols active in
their affront of Islam, but as unthreatening, inert relics of a
religion that locally had had its time. Religious wrath I could
understand, but this was pious pettifogging of a sort that filled
me that morning with fury.
Metin had made his bed by the time I returned. How could
they? I asked him. How could they scratch the plaster from
the gentle fresco faces of two-thousand-year-old saints? It wasa desecration. He smiled, took me by the arm and made me a
cup of tea.
'You're feeling upset? People have been feeling like you for
hundreds of years in Turkey,' he told me. For the first portraits
of Mahmud II which had been hung in public buildings in the
1830s had so incensed people that a guard was posted below
each and every portrait to protect them from attack. Even
under the Young Turks, it was considered an offence to
religion that the human form be represented in school textbooks.
In 1914, when the Sultan's head first appeared on the
country's stamps, public outrage was but partially mollified
by the official explanation that He only appeared on the most
expensive stamp. Even in 1922, there were serious doubts as
to whether Prince Abdul Mejid was fit to become Caliph, the
head of all Muslims, on the grounds that he had once painted
portraits of his friends.
By October 1926, the Caliphate had been consigned to
history. On October 4 the remnants of Koranic Law were
replaced by a civil code based on the Swiss and German
models. The day before, they had ceremoniously unveiled on
the banks of the Bosphorus, in full view of the affronted ghosts
of the past mouldering in the old Sultan's palace at Topkapi,
Turkey's very first statue. It was of the Gazi. He was wearing
a dinner jacket, his arms were folded, and he was bare headed.
'Think how that made good Muslims feel, a bare-headed
statue?' asked Metin. 'That was a desecration every bit as bad
as your defaced fresco.' The various Islamic brotherhoods that
took to attacking the proliferation of busts and statues of
Ataturk in towns and cities across Turkey leant support to his
view.
Tradition and progress, East and West, traded punches
with each other in Turkey. They had learned with the aid of
sharp flints and statues respectively how best to insult each
other. So far a resolution of the Cappadocian kind, churches
for hermits and congregations alike, appeared to be beyond
them.There was a time, early that same evening when the sun
had fallen low on the horizon, the snow was hard on the
ground, and the light had turned the stone a ferocious purple,
that the truncated cones did not remind me of the euphemistic
fairy chimneys of the Muslims nor of Christian penises. Even
in the landscape were now reminders of fezzes.chapter eleven




Konya, city of mystic rituals and whirling, of floating
turquoise domes and entombed dervishes, had bigger things
on its mind the morning I arrived. For when the local football
team is in trouble, hard fact tends to intrude; there's no refuge
in the spirit world from the fearful threat of relegation.
Whirling was one thing, the eternal footballing attributes like
passing to feet quite another. Survival in football is an empirical
business, the hard-graft accumulation of points that act as
vital ballast against the drop. And in Konya, where they had
won once in eighteen attempts, those points were just not
accumulating fast enough.
Wistful, soon established as the nickname of the young
man who had greeted me at Konya's bus station, agreed.
Wistful by nature, his personality was currently in the grips of
a football fan's profound disillusionment. 'If you want to
watch football,' he said, 'don't watch Konyaspor.' And yet,
like every addict, he had known all week that he would
surrender to the compulsion when the time came.
We had met as I got off the bus. 'I am pleased to help you
on your arrival in Konya?' an English-speaking voice had
impressed me, and I turned to the sight of a young man with
a football scarf wrapped around his neck. When, however, I
replied in English, Wistful's eyes clouded over in articulate
admission that this one sentence was the sum and tally of his
English. Wistful had learned that these alien noises usually
sufficed to kick-start a satisfactory series of nods, smiles, and
scraps of mimicry that passed for communication - and at least
got visitors back to the shop, which was the purpose of hisvigil- Wistful was regularly dispatched by his boss to trawl the
bus station for foreigners newly arrived and presumably
wealthy. The idea was that suggesting budget hotels and
helping tourists to gain their city bearings might encourage
them to spend a few hundred thousand lira at the bric-a-brac
shop where he worked. But Wistful ended up with me, who
only wanted to accompany him to the football game.
We dropped my bags at the shop, lifted a couple of
prayer mats on which to rest our bottoms (Wistful had a
certain antique elan) and headed for the game. Inside the
stadium, the grass was as yellow-brown and ice seared as
the steppe outside; I had somehow imagined that Anatolia
would not apply here, that the climatic and scenic rules would
be waived for the few hundred square metres of earth inside
the stadium. But I was wrong; it was a relatively flat piece
of typical goat graze furnished with the standard Anatolian
elements. Besides, there was the police presence, despite
a home crowd so used to losing that only the unique experience
of winning might stir them to trouble. The police
were massed in huge numbers behind each goal complete
with visors, batons, and riot shields. Oncoming forwards,
springing the offside trap, must wonder whether they are
destined for glory or a good thumping. Furthermore, the
crowd was so much an extension of the exclusively male,
smoking, and sunflower-shell-spitting hubbub found throughout
Turkey that the whole stadium felt like the quintessence
of Anatolia.
The opposition came from Bursa, city of history and a
hundred and fourteen contraband fez packages. Venerable
Konya could match Bursa stride for stride in the history stakes,
but when it came to football it soon became clear that the
visitors' abilities left the journeymen locals for dead. The ball
fairly flowed between the yellow-shirted visitors. The every
touch of one Ali Reza was greeted with a torrent of abuse, for
he had been unwise enough to transfer from Konya to Bursa a
few months earlier.'He's only a professional footballer,' came the voice of
reason from a teacher on my right.
'And may he fuck his mother,' returned the chant from the
surrounding crowd.
When Konya hit the post on a rare breakaway, the crowd
braced itself for a shock win. Although there were younger
supporters among the crowd who needed reminding of the
fact, such wins had happened before. Although it seemed like
a lifetime ago, Konya had actually won as recently as the
previous year. There were even those who remembered it.
Despite all this, however, another win was considered highly
unlikely, and nobody was surprised when Bursa broke the
deadlock in the second half. The collective expression of prayer
daring to call itself hope gave way on every side to the Turkish
gesture of disgust, the single thrown arm that asks why, why
did you do that so badly?
Even the reasonable teacher joined in. 'He's not a footballer,'
he screamed at a Konya player's fumbled touch. 'He's
a carpenter!' And the crowd around him roared their approval
as the teacher abandoned reason as a bad job.
'If we don't win this one, we're down, we're down,' the
cry went up. Hard-nosed realism rather than wit was the
Konya crowd's discerning feature. 'If you don't win this one,
you're down, you're down,' they then sang, cruelly withdrawing
any emotional investment in the fate of the team. And then
turning to each other, and further yet from the players, they
taunted them with feigned indifference. 'If they don't win this
one, they're down.'
The mass rejection seemed to spur the Konya players. With
ten minutes to go, they grabbed an equalizer and the air was
filled with flat caps and skull caps, pistachio nuts and dried
apricots. They were pushing for the winner when the final
whistle blew. Then the air was filled with the polystyrene
mats which spectators without access to prayer mats had
bought before the game, signalling the white flag of relegation
in lopsided flight above the stands. That was it; a draw justwould not do. No crowd in the entire history of the game had
ever had to fall back on mathematical notions of survival so
early in the season. Starved of results, the team had needed a
high-protein diet of wins starting today to stand any real
chance. Wistful was close to tears as we streamed out of the
stadium. I offered to buy him a doner kebab.
'Cheer up,' I comforted him. 'Your city has other things
to be proud of.'
'But all we want,' Wistful replied, 'is to stay in the first
division.'
Whatever Wistful's feelings, however, Konya was not
really a footballing city. The performance was hardly surprising
in a place that has been the home of Turkish Sufism, a highly
mysticized form of Islamic belief in which football plays no
immediately obvious part, since the thirteenth century. It was
a lot to ask of a dervish people who spent years perfecting a
trancelike whirling dance called the sema that they adapt to the
various footballing permutations of sweepers and flat back
fours.
Turkish Sufism was inspired by Mevlana, who was born
in northern Afghanistan around ad 1200 and whirled his way
across the Middle East as a young man with the rest of his
father's family in flight from the invading Mongols. They
reached Konya via Baghdad and Damascus. Baha Veled,
Mevlana's father, was the kind of man who, when challenged
as to his origins and destination by Baghdad's city guards,
replied: 'We are coming from God, and we are going towards
God. No one but God has the power and the energy to stop
us. We are coming from beyond space and we are bound for a
world beyond space.' 'Yeah yeah,' you can hear Baghdad's
guards reply, 'but what do we put on the visa?'
Mevlana quickly proved himself to be every bit the son of
his father and awoke in the people of Konya an enthusiastic
devotion to his spiritual ideals. Every spare minute, he led
them on a frenzied whirl in pursuit of the divine, ecstatic love
that the sema induces. It is said to serve as the conduit throughwhich man's spiritual journey to God is channelled. As I
finished my kebab that afternoon, it struck me that the Turkish
adjective used to describe the sema whirl is also ascribed to the
movement of a kebab on its vertical spit. I briefly imagined
strips of lamb departing the spit in centrifugal frenzy and
plastering themselves to any passing custom.
At the Mevlana Museum, where dervishes whirled around
the mausoleum of their spiritual leader before they were
proscribed by Atattirk in the 1920s, a leaflet explained the sema thus: 'Contemporary science definitely confirms that the fundamental
condition of our existence is to revolve . . . The
shared similarity among beings is the revolution of the electrons,
protons, and neutrons in the atoms . . . Everything
revolves and man carries on his life by the revolution of his
blood, by his coming from the earth and his return to it, which
is also a kind of revolution, by his revolving with earth itself.'
Then, I thought, there was the endless revolution of worry
beads between Turkish fingers, not to mention the doner
kebab. Still, devoting one's life to sema whirling when so
much whirling, planetary, biological, and culinary, was going
on elsewhere struck me as excessive. Whenever I'd whirled as
a child, I quickly felt dizzy and sick, and the one thing my
mother did not seem to feel for me when I threw up down her
front was divine love.
But this is to quibble with a magically off-beat manifestation
of spirituality. Since Ataturk's proscription of the dervishes,
they have only been permitted to dance in cultural
festivals, a context that not only unshackles the sema from its
religious anchor but presents it less as an extraordinary rite of
personal faith than a commercial performance. The Mevlana
festival takes place every December in Konya - in a large hall
resembling nothing so much as a gymnasium. The setting only
reinforces the sense that the sema has been terminally emasculated
of its original spiritual potency. The dervishes also tour;
I once saw them at the Royal Albert Hall. Men who oncewhirled for nobody but their God now perform for audiences
at events brokered by international cigar-smoking impresarios.
Dervishes are perhaps too far gone to worry about mere
human interference of the kind imposed upon them by Ataturk.
But in their more conventionally conscious moments, it
may have dawned upon them that there has actually been a
counter-current running over the past few years, in the form
of a tacit encouragement to return to the original spirit of the sema. President Ozal attended the Mevlana Festival in 1989.
The Festival was introduced by the Minister of Culture. Rather
than appeal for a cultural appreciation of Mevlana - he was
after all the Minister of Culture - the Minister called for a
veneration of Mevlana and his religious beliefs.
If anything might substantiate the trend, I thought, hat
sales would. So I went to see Mehmet Girgic; the only man in
the world to make true dervish hats or sikkes. It was true;
Mehmet was making more such hats than ever before. He had
just sent a consignment of ten sikkes to America, where he
reckoned there were some one hundred practising dervishes,
but more tellingly had recently finished two for apprentice
dervishes in the city of Elazig, some four hundred miles to the
east. For if whirling was no more than the latest passing fad in
an aerobicized America, then it was the real thing in remote
and dusty Elazig.
Sikkes have often been described as fawn fezzes but the
description is not entirely accurate. For it is not only their
natural wool colour (mohair fawn or sheep's wool white) that
is different; sikkes are twice the height of fezzes. But there are
unmistakable similarities in that they too are truncated cones.
And they are made of felt, like fezzes generally were until
twenty years ago when it began to be recognized that tourists
were quite inattentive to the material from which their souvenirs
were made.
In the gloom of his back-street atelier, Mehmet told me
his story. He came from a long line of sikke makers. Hisgrandfather had specialized in sikkes until Ataturk's proscriptions
when he diversified into other idt products such as
shepherds' cloaks, called kepeneks, and tents, known as yurts. It
was only fifteen years ago when Sufism first started to revive
(the dervishes were first permitted to whirl once more, if only
as cultural exhibits, in 1953) that the family firm received its
first sikke commission for over forty years. And Mehmet set
out to fulfil it.
'I never saw my grandfather make a sikke,' Mehmet told
me, 'but I remembered him explaining the process.' The staff
at the Mevlana Museum laughed at Mehmet when he visited
to examine the exhibit sikkes there. Did he really expect to
learn, with the aid of memory alone, a notoriously difficult art
that had been passed down the generations by hand? For the
teaching chain was surely broken, the links of knowledge were
severed, and the art of sikke making was consequently lost for
ever.
It took Mehmet a number of abortive attempts, but he
finally succeeded, and has been honing his art ever since. He
reckoned to have made around a thousand sikkes in his lifetime.
One of the commissions which had given him the greatest
pleasure was from the Mevlana Museum; to supply new
exhibit sikkes as replacements for the moth-eaten objects
topping the sarcophagi of Mevlana and his various acolytes.
Not because he particularly revered Mevlana - he in fact
thought it might be to the benefit of all if dervishes did a little
more conventional work - but because the museum staff had
mocked his original efforts. And so he called those same sikke- eating moths his little foot-soldiers. You could almost imagine
him sprinkling surreptitious moth larvae around quiet corners
of the museum.
We agreed a price for my own personal sikke. I asked
Mehmet if it would succumb to the same mothy fate. 'Not so
long as you whirl in it,' he replied. 'Moths don't like whirling
although you wouldn't imagine it from the way they fly round this light in summer. Otherwise, seal it in a plastic bag with a

164
couple of mothballs when you're not planning to whirl.
'Luckily,' he explained gleefully, 'that's not an option for
museum exhibits.'
In spite of Mehmet's down to earth approach, Sufism and
felt making were a potent combination as far as that gland of
mine devoted to mystical theorizing was concerned. While
Mehmet waxed lyrical on the excellence of mohair and fine
winter sheep's wool or condemned the standard practice of
chemical washes, I was digging up half-forgotten fleece references
from mythology; Jason and his Golden Fleece, or
Odysseus escaping the clutches of Cyclops by clinging to the
fleecy underbelly of a giant ram.
'Ah, you want that kind of stuff,' replied Mehmet with an
artisan's proper disdain for anything other than ability, a
practised eye, and quality materials. 'You'd better have a
cigarette. You want the story of the central Asian nomad who
is broke and cold, and possesses nothing but a useless pile of
sheep's wool. The guy's tears fall on to the wool, it felts and hey
presto! - he's Mr Felt-Patent.' I just managed to stop
myself saying, 'But that's a wonderful story,' and looked
knowingly cynical instead.
The story was apocryphal and Mehmet was dismissive of
it but it contained an important truth. Felting, which occurs
naturally on sheep, occurs equally naturally with a pair of
hands, soap, and water. Mehmet was now working on my sikke. He took two flat pieces of mohair fleece and hemmed
them together with his fingers working soapy water along the
join, and then into the rest of the fleece until he was left with a
hairy, sealed bladder. 'Look,' he said. 'Try and pull it apart,'
and I couldn't. Mehmet was on practical ground, and he was
happy there.
He then rolled and kneaded the bag with his hands, a
process he described as 'cooking'. In English, this process of
causing the hairs to knit closely together is called 'fulling'
while the Scots, who used to tread felt to the same end, called
it 'waulking'. Mehmet then stiffened the bag with a sugarsolution before drawing it, double-thickness, over a wooden 51'fefee-shaped mould called a kalip.
I was watching a version of what Julia Pardoe had seen at
the Eyup Fez Factory in Constantinople a hundred and sixty
years ago, the original fez-making process. Making some one
hundred and eighty thousand fezzes a year, the workers at the
factory had preferred the Scottish method. The fezzes,
explained Pardoe, 'are flung into a marble trough . . . where
they are trodden by a couple of men; and afterwards given to
the blockers, who stretch them over earthen moulds to enable
them to take a good shape'.
"I used to make fezzes for the more discerning tourists in
exactly this way,' Mehmet told me. He rummaged amongst the
chaos in a corner of the room and passed me two pieces of wood
which, when placed together, formed a truncated cone. It was
an old wooden fez kalip which he had not used for twenty years.
'It came from my father and my grandfather,' said Mehmet.
On this wooden block genuine Ottoman fezzes had once
been made. It was like discovering a perfect fossil, all that
remained of something long since considered extinct. It tantalized
me. It also convinced me, as the fez kalip and my drying sikke stood alongside each other, that the two hats shared a
common ancestry. That they came from the same place,
however distant and uncertain.
And yet Atattirk had claimed that the fez originated with
the hated Greeks. But then, I figured, no suggestion was better
designed to dissuade Turks from wearing them. Atattirk was
sure to have claimed the fez as such, just as the anthropologist
would have been tempted to see it as a penis. The convincing
similarities between the two hats, and the fact that the sikke had been established in Konya since the thirteenth century,
suggested an older, more Turkish, and certainly less penile
ancestry for the fez.
Legend has it that the soul of Mohammed had a previous
existence in the spirit world, where Allah placed him in a vase
of light shaped like a sikke. Mehmet had his own theory.'You know,' he said, 'that the sema represents a form of
rebirth, a spiritual journey to a new understanding of life; well,
the white smock the dervishes wear is said to represent the
death shroud and the sikke stands for the tombstone.' He was
evidently sceptical, but that did not deter me from thinking of
befezzed tombstones all across Turkey. Like yew trees, something
drew these two hats towards death. It was another
connection that bound them.
Mehmet, meanwhile, was measuring my head. 'Large,' he
declared, 'very large,' and took a wedge of wood which he
drove between the two halves of the kalip over which my sikke was now fitted until the size was right. My sikke would be as
tight-fitting as all good sikkes, for in the centrifugal frenzy of
the sema an ill-fitting sikke would not only bust trances but
become a positively lethal weapon. Was the tapering shape of
the sikke, even in the highly spiritualized atmosphere of the
dervish world, primarily a design consideration, a safety
feature? Was it primarily a hat which would stay on?
It did not surprise me that Mehmet, practical Mehmet,
much preferred this theory to tombstones and vessels containing
essence of Mohammed. So I told him about a man called
Tommy Cooper, the much-loved British comedian who had
been very fond of his fez ever since first encountering it in
Egypt during the Second World War. When Cooper collapsed
on stage in London in April 1984, it is said that in his fall his
fez stayed on his head, and as he died he was still wearing it. It
was a stubborn hat, a hat that would not willingly leave the
head.chapter twelve

'In England, at any rate, the hat is never free from the
touch of the comic ... It is the plain truth that hats
generally, and any particular hat, even the word "hat",
are apt to raise a smile.'
- The Times, London; November 4 1925


On the outskirts of Konya lies a suburb called Mehram
where the ugly tower blocks of the city give way to small
groups of stone houses that were once steppe villages. Mehram
has been swallowed by the encroachment of the city but
among the winter apple trees, the mud walls, and the snow
dusted pathways, the trace elements of a rural past, you can
sense that Mehram has not yet been digested.
Like Mehmet Girgic, Mehram resident Fevzi Bircan was a
forty-year-old hat maker. But where Mehmet was fending off
orders for sikkes, Fevzi Bircan's fezzes were proving slower
than ever. Konya's only fez maker stooped as he directed me
to a cushion on the floor of his tiny front room while he tried
to make himself comfortable on one of his own. Fevzi had
been to hospital that morning for an examination of his
rheumatic back. 'It's all the fezzes,' he complained. 'That's
what does it.' Fevzi made between one and two thousand
back-hunching pieces a year. But increasingly it was patterned
hats that the retailers were demanding, bastard hybrid things
made from coloured curtain material with an ersatz oriental
feel. Fevzi shrugged. 'I'll make such things,' he said, 'but I'm
not proud of them.' He wanted to make fezzes. Fezzes did not
cost him any more pain than the other hats, and he enjoyed
making them. The trouble was nobody seemed to want themany more. Rheumatic Fevzi was the last of a dying breed. He
sighed deeply, the woes of the world upon his shoulders. 'And
the football,' he said.
'I was there,' I said consolingly.
'Don't tell me how bad they were.'
1 had hoped to watch Fevzi make a fez, but he did not want
to work today. In the intense winter cold, he felt the pains in
his back most acutely. So we talked instead about his trade and
he told me that he had not made a fez in felt - the original
manner - for twenty years. Since that time, Fevzi had made 'karton fezzes from a cardboard shell across which red baize
was stretched and secured before a tassle was sewn into the
top. It was not perhaps the old way but Fevzi was nevertheless
proud of his work. 'Bircan', I would soon hear people tell me,
'Bircan makes a fine fez.' He could make three such fezzes an
hour, a speed skill which he reckoned had taken him fifteen
years to perfect.
'And now,' he repeated, throwing open his arms and
wincing at the pain as he did so, 'people do not seem to want
them.' He patted the head of his fifteen-year-old son Aydin
who had sat quietly next to his father since my arrival. The pat
was reassurance for a son set, in spite of its decline, on the fez
making business.
'How many fezzes,' I asked Aydin, 'can you make in a
day?'
'One.'
'One?' I could hardly look impressed.
'But he will get faster,' said Fevzi rapidly, patting his son
again. I truly hoped so. For even at twenty-four times Aydin's
current fez-making speed, his father was hardly wealthy.
'But since you say nobody is buying fezzes any more,' I
asked, 'why doesn't he just learn the patterned ones?'
It was an insensitive remark. I might have suggested
that an orchestral conductor spin the hits at the local social
club disco, but I was surprised and humbled by the sheerdismissiveness of the shrug that greeted my suggestion. I had
not known shoulders were capable of such seismic movement,
especially not arthritic ones.
'We are fez makers,' proud Fevzi replied eventually. And
that was that.
Mrs Bircan brought us coffee in cups as tiny as her fleeting
appearance in a man's world. There were snow flurries at the
window and shudders of sunshine that flickered across a
portrait of Fevzi's grandfather dressed in a turban. Did Fevzi
resent the abolition of the fez?
'It has certainly not helped business,' he said, smiling
gravely. 'Besides, people should be able to wear what they
like. And since we are allowed to make fezzes for tourists,
maybe we should get some support or encouragement from
the tourism ministry.'
'Especially since the fez means so much to Europeans,
certainly to people in England,' I told him.
Interested, Fevzi asked me why. I told him that a comic
magician called Tommy Cooper had always worn one; it was
regarded as one of his best jokes. Fevzi looked disappointed.
'Maybe that is wrong,' he said. 'To make a joke of the fez
is wrong.'
He might have been thinking of the revered livelihood of
his family, of his God, or of those fez wearers who had been
hanged. In fact, as I soon realized, Fevzi did not like such jokes
chiefly because they reminded him that he too would soon be
reduced to making them. Fevzi was set on going to the resort
town of Bodrum on the Aegean for the summer. He would
take Ay din, pack a bag of red baize and cardboard kartons, and
set up a fez-making workshop for the tourists. He had a cousin
there who had already promised to help arrange matters.
'Nobody knows how to make fezzes in Bodrum,' he
explained. 'I'm sure the tourists will come.'
It was a very good idea. In Bodrum, Fevzi was sure to sell
plenty of fezzes. But Fevzi would finally have to face up to theunpalatable truth that he was selling no revered article of
headgear but a favourite joke of the Europeans. In Konya,
Fevzi had long been able to sustain the dream, the dream that
he was a simple milliner making respected fezzes like his
forefathers to sell with an artisan's dignity into the unchanged
mainstream of Turkish life. For in the view from his Konya
house there was nothing to disturb the fantasy, nothing to
remind him that the fezzes he made were actually destined for
tourists in search of a laugh, nothing to suggest that his fezzes
would actually frequent the bars, beaches, and discos of the
infidels rather than mosques, tea houses, and Turkish homes
as they had always done. Perhaps, a lifetime after the abolition
of the fez, Fevzi knew that the dream was no longer
sustainable.
Leaving Konya for Bodrum would mean leaving Turkey
for the world I had witnessed in Pomegranate. Fevzi would
court tourists face to face. He would enter that shadow world
where he not only made hats but performed them out of the
shop. He would reinvent himself as a jolly heritage figure, the
fez maker forced to sing for his supper, develop a patter, and
laugh at the joke that the fez had become. Could he enter into
the joke? I asked him.
He nodded slowly. 'What else can I do?' he replied, his
hands outstretched. 'Tourists are all that there's left. Besides,'
he smiled, 'the Bodrum weather will be excellent for my back.
And they say it's beautiful in the summer.' The modern world
was busy digesting Fevzi Bircan.
By the time I came to leave, his mood had visibly lightened.
'That English magician man,' he said; 'can you write his
name for me?' And I could already see it, the freshly painted
sign saying 'Tommy Cooper Fez Factory' above the door of a
back-street Bodrum workshop. I asked to take Fevzi's photograph
but he pointed at his son and said, 'Take a photo of him;
he's the story.' Aydin Bircan, fifteen and already a story, stood
framed in the front door as the snow fell, fez on his head andlooking straight at the camera, proud of his father's
expectations.
It felt entirely typical of Turkey's many paradoxes that
while Fevzi's forefathers had made hats for Turks in the
country's most avowedly religious city, his son would
improve his strike rate making hats for tourists in the tabloid
town they jokingly referred to as 'Bedroom'.
I said goodbye, turned up my collar, and trudged through
the fresh snow in a whirler's city that wanted nothing but to
be known for its football. It was evening, and a maroon haze
was cast above the city. Snowflakes buzzed frantically like
night insects in the glare of the street lights and car headlamps.
And out here, beyond Konya's heart of domes and minarets,
monuments to beliefs and traditions so entirely of the spirit
world, the wool markets, long arcades of gloomy concrete
shops, stockyards, grain silos, industrial felt factories where
they turned out rolls of the stuff for use in blackboard cleaners,
and kebab houses with broken lightbulbs, all looked earthbound,
just like the footballing heartland that Wistful dreamed
of.
The light was yellow at the night-time windows, nurturing
a profound sense of welcome that led me to Wistful's, where
the day's haul of tourists were being entertained. It was a
curious shop, for in the several visits that I had made there, I
had not encountered so much as a single conventional customer.
Admittedly, midwinter was not the best time for the
sale to wealthy tourists of prayer mats, rugs, pieces of furniture,
musical instruments, hats, jewellery, or wooden carvings.
But it no longer felt so much like a shop as an ill-lit but
rather cosy living-room. A convivial parlour atmosphere had
crept up on antiques putting on the posh, mugged them, and
restored them to use as amenable pieces of furniture. The
chairs and the kilims were regularly sat on, prayer-mats were
requisitioned to guard against the chill of the football stadium,
the nargilye water-pipes were smoked, the copper ashtrays
were filled with cigarette butts, and items of jewellery wereexamined, fiddled with, worn, and then left lying on a low
table among a wreckage of resting feet. All in all, it was a
profoundly comfortable place washed in that soft, buttermilk
light. Wistful and his boss had originally embarked with brave
ideas of a proper antique shop in which tidy pieces stood in
exhibited isolation. But it had rapidly gone the way of other
Turkish shops and become a home, a retreat that even now
was hosting a party consisting of Wistful, two Australians, a
Belgian, and several bottles of raki.
The Australian couple were recounting the story of their
journey. From the window, I'd noticed Wistful shudder, as if
nails were being singly removed from his toes. I entered with
some concern only to discover it was the pronunciation as the
Australians roamed Turkey like linguistic Mongols, condemning
blameless towns and villages on their itinerary to such
utter destruction of the pronunciation that nothing of the
original remained.
Less expansive was the Belgian, who wore a beard. His
suspicious mien suggested that even the disclosure of information
about his journey might leave him feeling robbed.
Despite the fact that he was drinking raki freely supplied by
Wistful's boss, he continued to wear his money belt. He told
me that he had recently come from Iran. 'Now there's a cheap
country,' he said. Meanwhile, the Australians admitted to
spending, even by my standards, a stupefyingly low sum of
money in Turkey. Something had gone awry with Wistful's
tourist-trapping system. Far from selecting the fat cats, he
seemed to have developed an unerring eye for bus station
strays.
But tonight it did not seem to matter. As the travelling
foreigners described places he would never see, Wistful was
discovering what amusing company the raki bottle could be.
He was a young man and perhaps this very night was losing
his alcoholic virginity. The abject failings of Konyaspor were
forgotten as he picked up surrounding artefacts and gazed at
them with an ardent concentration, as if some aspect of eachparticular object left him staggered by an electric storm of
mystical recognition. And then he noticed the object to his
right which eventually swam into focus as the Australian girl.
While her boyfriend remained deep in conversation with the
Belgian, Wistful took my dictionary and buried his face in it.
He finally surfaced, patted the Australian girl on the shoulder,
and pointed to a word among the pages.
'Fondle?' she asked.
'Hah!' Wistful could not know whether this was precisely
the right word, but suspecting from his cross-referencing that
it was from the right lexical family, he chanced his arm with
it, and said 'fondle' too.
The Australian boyfriend was transfixed in the headlight
intensity of the Belgian's relentless description of a seventeen
hour wait somewhere on a snowbound train. Not that the
boyfriend's awareness would have moderated Wistful's behaviour,
now whirling with the magical discovery of alcohol
induced indiscretion. But try as he might, his failings with my
dictionary turned his intended indiscretions into nonsensities.
'Flounder?' asked the girl, drawn by Wistful's pointing
finger to a second entry in the dictionary. Perhaps Wistful did
not like the sound of the word, for he repeated 'flounder' with
no more confidence than she. From the deep raki-inspired
wells of feeling, poor Wistful was drawing flat fish.
Later, I discovered that he'd been trying to convey the
floundering nature of his attempts to communicate with her.
But it had not worked, a fish having got in the way of this
apologetic prelude to a grander statement. So he dispensed
with the prelude altogether and, the boyfriend still captive on
a snowbound Iranian train, leaned across, kissed her on the
mouth, and said, 'I low you.'
And so it was that Wistful actually delivered an English
sentence whose meaning he properly understood. The first
thing he learned in a language he did not know was how to
express love. Or perhaps it was only inebriation. Vulnerable
intimacy would probably be the guiding condition of his life.Did he chink that this leap of faith might move the girl to
understand Turkish, or he English, or that their feelings for
each other would far outreach any need of conventional
language? As for her, would she slap him?
She did not slap him. Nor did she turn aggrieved to her
boyfriend. All she said was that she lived in London, and that
was the uselessness of it all. That cold winter evening, there
was nothing more pitiful than Wistful's blank expression,
which indicated that he had not understood a word of her
careful reply. Mere language had defeated them. Into the pure
futility of the moment a money-belted Belgian voice
manoeuvred itself. 'I am thinking maybe we are here, in this
snowdrift, until spring comes.'
Wistful looked up. 'Where's this man from?' he asked, with
drunken contempt.
'Belgium,' 1 replied.
Wistful smiled and spoke a few words of Turkish. 'Oh,
that small village in France?' After defeat in a language not his
own, he could still triumph at home.chapter thirteen




When you arrive at the bus station in Istanbul, the taxi
drivers offer to take you to a hotel. In Ankara, they invariably
assume you want to go to the airport. Most, when you direct
them otherwise, will query your instruction. When I said that
I wanted a look around the town, mine swerved in astonishment
and almost took out one of the city's many statues of Atattirk. For the next few minutes, I was aware of his eyes
scrutinizing me in the rear-view mirror as if my interest in the
city made me exotic and unpredictable.
'Why?' he asked.
His surprise was typical, for not even Ankara's own people
- and few of them would describe themselves as such - take
much pride in the city. Convinced that they have somehow
been tricked into staying, most of Ankara's citizens find it hard
to believe that anyone would be here of his own free will.
They wear the bemused expressions of those who, after a
protracted pinch, have just discovered a distressing truth: / actually live here. And since we have had children here and watched
them turn into adults, I have evidently lived here for some time.
Certainly, they never meant to. Their intention was to do
the statutory time here, the rich to oil a few contacts and be
seen around in the regime's favourite city, the poor to make
some fast money before getting out. Ankara is an in-and-out
fast kind of place at Turkey's geographical hub, a place of
planes, trains, and buses which bring people in only to dream
of the day that they are finally taken out. But that day does not tend to come. Ankara is a transit lounge now containingthree million people who have been about to go home for
years.
In the early 1900s, this dusty steppe town was home to a
mere thirty thousand souls. It boasted a modest reputation for
cats and wool. With no port nor river of any significance,
Ankara was just one of the towns on one of the ancient trading
routes across Anatolia. In Hittite times, it had been a caravanserai
for royalty, but that was long ago. And yet this town
awoke on October 9 1923 to the news that it had just been
crowned the new capital of Turkey.
The diplomatic community in Constantinople was aghast
at the idea of being posted to a distant town where the
communications and facilities were practically non-existent,
and made their Turkish counterparts aware of these feelings in
no uncertain terms. Since, by definition, diplomats were
supposed to be diplomatic about their posting's choice of
capital, they obviously felt strongly about it. One recently
appointed foreign ambassador asked a visiting English writer,
something of an old Turkey hand, what changes she had seen
in Ankara since it became the capital.
'When I stayed in this hotel seven years ago,' she replied,
'the room next to mine was occupied by goats, sheep, and
donkeys. Now it is occupied by Your Excellency.' The
ambassador shuddered.
But as far as Atattirk was concerned, the foreigners could
learn to live with lingering farmyard smells. Ankara was
Anatolian, and that was the end of it. The town may have
been nowhere, but nowhere rather than the shores of the
Ottoman-tainted Bosphorus happened to be the geographical
heart of the new nation. Nation and capital would share a fresh
start and a new city European in style would rise from the
unsullied expanses of the steppe.
On our approach that morning, however, the landscape
was clueless, devoid of the merest suggestion that it was
working up to some kind of metropolitan head. Beyond the
bus windows were bleak brown hills and poplar trees, telephone
lines running a dance of sun slivers to the horizon, and
goats champing at the thin scrub. All was as it should be in
rural Turkey when segments of city suddenly appeared
between the folds of hills - brown roofs and towers and
factory chimneys - and it looked most improbable, like a
planner's mightiest howler. Here? asked the incredulous voice
in my head. They told you to build it here?
Evidently, a city tour had never before been requested of
my taxi-driver. While he shrugged his shoulders, throwing
confused turns left and right like an outmanoeuvred boxer, I
tried to concentrate on evidence of the young capital's republican
idealism: the wide European thoroughfares with names
like Independence Street and Republic Boulevard, the opera
house, the Empire-style railway station, and the Youth Park.
There were the statues to Atattirk, who was also remembered
in a nearby state farm and a cultural centre as well as at least
two main roads, Atattirk Boulevard and Gazi Mustafa Kemal
Boulevard. We passed the ministries, the parliament buildings,
the museums, the official guest house, and the Central Bank.
These shiny levers of the young capital, which the new nation's
first bureaucrats, civil servants, bankers, businessmen, and
politicians had been posted here to operate seventy years ago,
seemed to confirm that Ankara had not been built on the
organic principle that position attracts trade attracts population,
but as an extended monument to an abstracted ideal of
Anatolian national pride and rebirth.
Atattirk envisaged the development of his city as stylish
suburbs in stately encroachment on the steppelands, a harmonious
extension from the civic core. But he and his planners
had not taken into account the fact that the bankers and the
diplomats, the bureaucrats and the politicians, the editors and
the businessmen needed the help of more than their thrusting
young assistants. They needed tea-boys and secretaries. They
needed grocers and taxi drivers, tailors and policemen. They
needed waiters and plumbers, park attendants and road sweepers.Their new-fangled typewriters needed repairing, their
shoes cleaning, letters processing, telephones operating. The
hotels needed doormen and bellboys, cleaners and cooks. The
embassies needed drivers and gardeners, secretaries and maids.
In short, they needed a population.
But fledgeling Ankara was foot-bound like a pretty Chinese
girl. And so long as the city looked good, with the administrative
and cultural functions gleaming, the pain and the deformity
went unnoticed. Visible status symbols such as the opera
house and the ministries were what mattered, with a few
statutory minarets where absolutely unavoidable.
But it could not last. Ankara would break free of the
bindings. To the anger of the authorities, new migrants started
to build on the hilly outskirts of the city. Convinced that they
could control what they considered their own creation, the
authories forbade construction. But the new legislation was
not watertight, and the migrants eventually traced the leak to
the fact that the building restrictions could be interpreted to
apply only to the hours of daylight. And so the gecekondu, the
'night-built' house, was born. Like vampires, the migrants
went about their construction in the hours of darkness, the
hammers falling silent at dawn, and the gecekondu spread and
grew strong, drawing what little life remained from the
anaemic vision of Ataturk's planners. In its place, a big-city
pulse, weak at first but growing steadily stronger, rang out
across the gecekondus. Toytown was starting to function, to
hustle. It was as if this unreal creation had gradually adapted
to the rigours of metropolitan rhythms until it finally sat up all
on its own and breathed. By 1960, the population had reached
half a million en route to the three million who now live there.
Soon, exuberant vistas of colourful shacks and houses
mottled the hillsides of the suburbs, and Ankara was
uncomfortably surrounded on all sides. It was as if the
Anatolian village had come to call on the pretensions of the
unreal city, and the city pretended not to recognize it. But you
must remember me, persisted the village; it was only a few decadesback. And the city blushed, turned away, and said: 'What an
idea!' and everybody laughed politely.
But everybody knew. With the chaotic suburbs, Ankara
was at once shorn of its grand European ideas. The showpiece
for visiting overseas dignitaries had instead become Turkish,
all buses, buildings, and coal dust, and the splendid reverb of
Turkish life. In beds of cement that had once been fresh, the
numerous imprinted paws of stray dogs and cats were evidence
of what the city had become: alive.
We drove up Constitution Street in balmy sunshine. The
mildest day for weeks reminded me of the coldest winter for
years, nine winters ago when the air had been thick with
lignite from the boilers and smuts decorated the washing
hanging grimy from the windows of the apartments, when
slabs of ice swept broken-backed from the roads lay piled
along the pavements, and people trudged through the snow
past the constructions at Kocatepe, due to become the biggest
mosque in the Middle East, or made for the terracotta-painted
opera house.
I had taught English here in 1984. The Kocatepe mosque,
whose vast shadow had fallen across the windows of my
apartment, was almost finished now. I walked down the hill
to my old school building, but the school had moved premises.
Beyond shutters that rattled in the wind, the classrooms were
empty and a school table that had been abandoned on the
patchy front lawn had collapsed at one end, as if to its knees.
On the television in the nearby cafe, an afternoon football
match was beginning in Istanbul. Before the kick-off, the
teams unfurled a long banner advertising Saturday's Bosnia
rally, and the crowd roared its approval. I had often come here
in the afternoon to treat myself to honeyed baklava, the syrupy
walnut pastries that the Turks adore. In the years of my
absence, the boy waiter had grown a moustache, a belly, and
become a man. In the kebab house opposite, the man who
operated the till had grown old and grizzled. His eyes were
soft now, all enquiry gone. Neither of these old acquaintancesvolunteered any memory of me, and it all seemed too long
ago to start again. The warm expectation of old familiarity
soon shrivels at blank faces and empty buildings.
I stood above the ruined snow wainscottings that hung
mud-caked where road and pavement met and hailed another
taxi. I might have headed west to Ataturk's mausoleum,
resembling an enormous classical temple manned by a guard
of honour and decked out in marble high on a hill above the
city where the man's remains lie in a great sarcophagus. But,
temporarily, Ataturk's example had been eclipsed in the jarring
sound of an explosion that had given secular Turkey its latest
martyr. So I headed east across the city to the Modern
Cemetery in the suburb of Cebeci, where the remains of Ugur
Mumcu had been lying for a week.
For days, Turkish television had screened nothing but
Mumcu's funeral. The service at the Maltepe Mosque in the
middle of Ankara had brought two hundred thousand mourners
on to the streets. Mumcu's coffin, draped in a Turkish
flag, was carried to the mosque as the crowds showered it with
flowers while a storm laden with rain and sleet swept across
the city and left black ribbons of mud and broken rose petals
draped among the feet that filled the crowded streets. After the
ceremony, a crowd several miles in length set out towards
Cebeci. The air was rent with utterings of grief and slogans of
outrage. 'Damn Hezbollah', they screamed. 'Turkey will never
be another Iran.' They also damned their overweight President,
Turgut Ozal, considered to have given official sanction
to the Islamic revival in Turkey, screaming: 'The fat man, the
enemy of secularism.' They also screamed at the police who
were attempting to supervise them, for in the present police
vigilance there was a reminder of unforgivable laxity. From
the constantly manned look-out post just twenty-five yards
from where Mumcu's car had been parked prior to the
explosion, the police had somehow failed to notice a large
bomb being planted.
Today, last week's rain was only a memory among thedamp road-wrack, the mixture of cigarette ends, litter, old
twigs, and mud that lay as if abandoned on a high tide by the
wayside. As I watched, the weak sun was desiccating the
surface mud and a light wind was releasing into the air the first
granular stirrings as an early reminder of the dust that would
come with summer.
Within the walls of the cemetery, all was quiet. Scarce low
evergreens cast brief chill bars across the earth. Magpies made
slow-motion progress, laden, skittering flights between the
headstones to perch above the Modern Cemetery's many
modern deaths. None of the headstones was inscribed with
dates from the old Islamic calendar, which had been abolished
in 1925. There was little lichen and not a fez top in sight, only
neat lines of graves with inscriptions that gave names, dates,
and the towns from which the dead had originally come.
'From Diyarbakir', 'From Konya', 'From Balikesir', said the
stones, marking the resting places of recent migrants to a city
that during long lifetimes had evidently failed to become
home. In these inscriptions was a denial of Ankara and the
modern world it represented, as if death only confirmed the
old ways and the avenues of the past.
As I looked for Mumcu's headstone, I wondered how it
would read. I guessed that he who had died for the cause of
secular democracy might at least tie himself to his adopted city, Ataturk's secular citadel, perhaps the first of all these
migrants to look forward, to choose as his epitaph the words
not 'From Kirsehir' but 'Of Ankara'.
As I searched for Mumcu's grave among the stones,
glimpses of sunlit, snow-covered hills showed beyond the
trees, and in the stillness I thought I could almost hear the
relics of those bitter screams echoing through the cemetery
long after his burial. And the noise of those television scenes
returned to me. The wailing, the screaming and tears, the
upwelling of emotion on a sea of human movement reminded
me of Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral in Tehran four yearsearlier. Only nobody had blown the Ayatollah into one
hundred pieces for his beliefs.
Like an Edwardian murder mystery where it soon transpires
that every surviving guest possesses the motive to have
slipped the cyanide into the champagne or bludgeoned the
victim with the candlestick, it was unclear who had killed
Mumcu. He represented the persuasive voice of the established
version of Turkey, and his murder was a calculated strike
against any number of modern Turkey's defining principles secular,
democratic, unitary, and Western-oriented - in the
hope that it might not always prevail. The only certain
conclusion that could be drawn from the possible suspects was
that they made for a long list, and Mumcu's modern Turkey
had made many enemies.
The list was initially headed by radical Islam. Three separate
Islamic terror groups claimed responsibility for the assassination.
Since Mumcu was a staunch secularist and had been
repeatedly scathing of the Islamic movement in his journalism,
an Islamic plot made eminent sense. Iran was soon implicated
in the Turkish press and by Turkish politicians.
Another organization, however, was soon to claim the
killing as its own. The PKK, the Marxist-inspired Kurdish
Workers' Party, had been the subject of detailed investigations
by Mumcu. He was categorical in his condemnation of the
PKK cause, and in his support for the unitary Turkish state.
The PKK had every reason to silence a voice which so
persuasively opposed them.
Then there was Turkey's criminal fraternity which Mumcu
had investigated, ruffling gangland feathers in so doing, while
alleged links between the PKK and the Turkish Security
Service suggested another possible suspect. Mumcu had apparently
been investigating these links at the time of his death.
Had the Security Service ordered Mumcu's death in a bid to
protect itself from damaging revelations? Had the state itself
murdered a journalist who had become fatally over informed?The plot thickened when Refah suggested that the CIA was
actually responsible. America, Refah argued, was anxious to
prevent Turkey's emergence as a regional superpower and, as
a destabilizing measure, had murdered one of its leading
secularists. The subsequent heightening of tensions between
Turkey and Iran, Refah explained, would serve America well
by increasing Turkey's military and strategic reliance upon her.
Enter the 'document'. Produced by Refah, it purported to
confirm the involvement of the West, specifically Mossad and
CIA agents, in the murder of Mumcu. According to the
document, six such agents had apparently infiltrated Turkey
under cover of darkness and by boat. Under inspection,
however, the document was instantly revealed as a blatant
fake. But the question was: what kind of fake? A fake
attempting to pass itself off as an original or a fake banking on
being exposed as such? Was it a best effort to appear genuine,
prepared by Refah so as to pin the blame on the West and
divert it from the Islamic movement? Or was it the work of
Western agents, deliberately strewn with errors so that it
would appear after the most cursory of examinations as a
fabrication, and lead to the elimination as murder suspects of
the US and Israel?
Mumcu might have died at the hands of radical Islam,
Kurdish nationalism, the Turkish Mafia, the Turkish Security
Services, or the Americans and Israelis. A young couple
standing quietly in the gloaming finally alerted me to the
whereabouts of Mumcu's grave. I asked them who they
thought had killed him.
'The EC,' the man replied.
'The EC?' I was not sure I had heard him right.
'Definitely. If they can point to the murder of a few
journalists in unstable Turkey, they need not take our various
attempts at membership so seriously.'
Resistance to the Turkish state, it seemed, was on every
side. But on a wet day a week ago, two hundred thousand
Turks had gathered to defend it.His grave was a long bank of freshly turned earth piled
high with fading red and yellow carnations, and sprigs of
privet and bay whose stalks were wrapped in crinkles of silver
foil- There was no headstone yet. As I left, the last rays of
alchemical sunshine above the cemetery wall were turning a
few black branches to gold.
I emerged on to the street beyond the wall. The day was
drawing to an end. Young children were walking home from
school. The girls were neat in skirts and tights but the boys
wore their trousers in the inimitable Turkish style, an inch too
long, so that mud had become a permanent caked feature
around their hems. On the far side of the street, headstone
makers were working from a long line of cramped ateliers
amidst the wail of angle-grinders. Commerce hugged the
cemetery with an unseemly closeness, as if drawing a lover's
corpse to its chest. The masons were coated in a ghostly white
marble dust which made me fear they might at any moment
abandon their equipment and make for the cemetery gates for
the night before the sun finally disappeared. After a moment,
I beat off these morbid feelings and understood how appropriate
it actually was that headstone making and cemeteries should
coexist, a healthy recognition of life's eternal verities, until I
noticed what was being manufactured in the lulls between
headstone commissions. The masons were turning out kitchen
unit tops.
On each was a draining-board scored with fine long
grooves, while discs cut from the marble to make room for
the sinks lay around like prototype wheels. It might have been
an early Roman discount tyre centre.
Outside one atelier, two rooks were sitting on a stack of
recently completed headstones. The top inscription remembered
one Ibrahim Ersoy, 'Of Ankara'. The city was growing
up. It was becoming home, and I no longer needed to know
how Ugur Mumcu's stone would read when they finally
installed it above his remains in the Modern Cemetery. For
Ibrahim Ersoy was staying, without condition, in Ankara.chapter fourteen




That night, I caught the Blue Train to Istanbul.
'You're leaving,' said the taxi-driver as we set off for the
station in a night mist gathering above Ankara's boulevards,
and he pulled on his cigarette. An errant foreign body common
to Turkish brands, a length of barbecued treebark, supported
an exceedingly long stub and glowed to illuminate the driver's
face in the mirror like a Hallowe'en mask.
Tm catching the Blue Train,' I told him.
'Give me a ticket for the Blue Train,' I told the man at the
ticket office. The name of the nightly service between Turkey's
two major cities withstood repetition. The sound of it promised
mystery and intrigue. While Turkey's other trains, mostly
known by their scheduled departure times, slipped colourless
and unsung from the platforms, I imagined the excitements I
must encounter on the night run between the young capital
and the big city.
Still, I wondered why it should be blue.
'It just is,' shrugged the man at the ticket office without
enthusiasm. '11.21 p.m. Platform one.'
And blue it evidently just was to the junior businessmen
and civil servants, students and families ranged along the
platform making routine, broken conversation or reading early
editions of the next day's newspaper. Milli Piyango men, the
state lottery-ticket sellers, dodged among the waiting passengers
swivelling their round wooden boards to which bundles
of tickets promising billions were attached. But these were
billions of lira, in which sorry currency a mere £70, and £69.50
by tomorrow morning, made you a millionaire. 'MilliPiyango', they sang, but the lateness of the hour had wrung all
enthusiasm from their dirge-hollow pitches. In their peaked
white caps, they looked like dispossessed and slightly crazed
U-boat captains, toothless sharks cruising the platform for
titbits.
At the carriage window, I watched a flurry of torch signals,
flag motions, and whistles clear the train for departure. As the
Blue Train moved out with a lurch, the uniformed functionaries
waves their goodbyes with a fanfare, frontier zeal as if
they at least understood the romance of this particular train.
Railyards, distant stadiums, and low concrete buildings passed,
where pale yellow lights at the windows illuminated patches
of thin scrubby grass outside and fell across stacks of sleepers.
As I watched, we passed beyond the suburbs and the lights fell
away, only gathering as occasional pinpoint thickets to indicate
distant steppe villages in the darkness.
I was sitting next to a meticulous man, greying and
moustachioed. After attending to the fastidious organization
of his affairs, he turned to me and said: 'Perhaps you will drink
some raki?'
I followed in the wake of this man-sized introduction to
the buffet car.
We took the last seats in a crowded carriage where waiters
in white were pirouetting among the throng with bottles of
beer and glasses of raki, salads and savoury pastries, plates of
white goat's cheese and baskets of bread. In spite of the
cigarette burns and the meals that the moths had made of the
damask tablecloths, what little remained had been heroically
ironed and then draped with care across the tables. Water
glasses served as vases for small sprays of pink flowers, and
saucers supported white candle stubs. The evident effort had
infected the passengers, who seemed temporarily released from
the shackles of routine and were taking their enjoyment on a tube painted blue as it thundered through the Anatolian night.
Amid the noise and the light catching on raised glasses, my
host calmly caught the arm of a passing waiter.'A bottle of raki. Seventy-five centilitres. And water. Now.
Please.' He turned to me with a courteousness devoid of
unnecessary expression. 'I assume,' he continued, 'that you
have eaten.'
I hadn't. But there was something in the man's manner
which suggested that I should pretend I had. Even his assumptions,
I guessed, did not brook contradiction. As I went
hungry, the bottles arrived. He poured measures, filled our
glasses with water, gave a tiny, precise bow from the neck and
demolished his glass. He looked up and with the merest gesture
of the head suggested in no uncertain terms that I was to
follow suit. I did so, then screwed my empty glass into the
table top, gasped out loud, and looked up. But the man's eyes
were elsewhere, nickering with amused interest around the
carriage. The Blue Train was living up to its reputation.
He prepared himself another raki, administering the water
to turn it cloudy. When I asked him what he did for a living,
he threw back his head in silent laughter which I took for a
moment to be the prelude to his answer until I realized it was
the answer itself. He downed his raki with a wolfish smile and
dabbed precisely at the corners of his mouth with a paper
handkerchief. He lit a cigarette, sucked down a mouthful of
smoke, and in so doing swallowed much of his first question.
'Tanbul?'
I nodded. 'And you to Istanbul?' I countered. And he
smiled fulsomely, but that was all he did. It was a pleasant
enough smile but once again it was no answer. He was
drinking fast enough to do himself damage but I somehow
imagined that his innate elegance would safeguard against any
deterioration in his deportment. So when he first hiccupped, it
surprised me much as a royal fart might have done.
The man held my gaze until one o'clock in the. morning.
Lifting every refilled glass to within an inch of his lips, he
raised his eyebrows defiantly and threw the raki down his
throat. Whenever I smoked, he leaned across to light me up.
Whenever I asked a question, his attention was gone. Finally,in the ruins of the emptied carriage when the waiters sat
among the drooping candles reflected in the sheeny pallor of
their faces, the man closed his eyes. He sat still, his breathing
light, and two large teardrops formed, one at the corner of
each eye.
It was as if we had taken a late-night branch line into
another story entirely. In the tradition that I had always
associated with this train, that of the intrigue-filled thrillers of
Eric Ambler, I had expected this mysterious man to slip me a
scribbled address as he left, that of an Istanbul shipping agency
or perhaps the commercial attache's name at some shadowy
Balkan Consulate. Or he might have recommended me a
hotel, or addressed me by name on leaving so that later I might
have disturbing cause to wonder, since we had never been
introduced, how he could have known it. But I did not expect
my Blue Train contact to turn to tears, fall asleep, and leave
me to pay his bill.
'Every week the same,' said a sympathetic waiter, jerking
his head at the sleeping form as I handed over a cripplingly
large wad of notes. 'Manages to drink his way through a
complete stranger's pocket.'
In the sleeping carriage, a few late-night cigarettes were
being smoked. Elsewhere, sleepers lay childlike and crumpled.
It was hypothermically cold; every rhythmic movement of the
train ushered fresh draughts of steppe air through gaps in the
windows. Now I understood why they called it the Blue
Train. The wheels had settled into a long rhythm that broke at
regular intervals with an echoing report; it carried me off into
sleep.
Morning was a foul-mouthed, premature desecration.
Light flooded the carriage through torn curtains and provoked
a muttered tide of cringing affront as if the daylight had
invaded a covey of sleeping vampires. Heads surfaced waxy
and dishevelled. Sons disentangled themselves from elderly
mothers, stretched in the aisle, and lit cigarettes. Istanbul,
crumbly concrete and gnarled trees, gathered at the windows.My tearful neighbour's luggage had disappeared during the
night.
'You do this for fun?' a man mumbled, rubbing his eyes
with his fists above a black-stubbled face. 'Try doing it twice
a week.' My rucksack had given me away as a tourist, but his
words although addressed to me were primarily intended for a
nearby colleague. They served to make me realize what
differences existed; just as one man's romance was another
man's free drinking opportunity, so it was another's regular
commuting nightmare. The Blue Train was no strange
encounter on the periphery of experience, but getting to work
on a grey winter's morning. The man felt every impact of the
train's last few jolts low in his back as it slowed for the station
and the beginning of another working day. And I saw the train
winding down through Istanbul's shabby poetry of mosques,
factories, and wintry gardens to draw up at Haydarpasha
Station on the shores of the Bosphorus. Perhaps it was because
I did not live here that I could still dream of a time when these
waters leaped with fish, when people swam from the banks on
summer evenings, lay among cypresses full of turtle doves
below a canopy of stars and a crescent moon while a hundred
minarets stood bright above the city. My Blue Train journey
was drawing to a halt in this breathless spirit; I had come to
the end of the line, the end of a continent. But for the
commuter, it was merely time to disembark.
Steps led down to the quay and a ferry bound for the
European side. A slumbrous swell lifted the bows, snatched at
the oily warp lines, and slapped along the quayside. As we
moved into open water, a woman was tugging at an old bread
roll and tossing scraps to the waiting gulls. They arrived in
squadrons, making measured approaches from astern to pluck
the bread from the sky before winging away to circle and
return. Occasionally they would collide in airshow nightmares,
and the bread would tumble from their clasp to the
jackal birds that attended them. Beyond the breakwaters,sudden wind ran a file across patches of water, turning them
grainy and textured for a second before moving on.
As we approached the European side, I could make out a
crowd which had gathered on the quay to join the ferry for
its return voyage. Bags and heavy coats jostled for space, and
I understood that I was seeing for the first time the city
through their eyes. Heedless of Istanbul's fabled views, people
were going to work across the city, to join the gulls in the
ceaseless hunt for scraps. And so it was a grey February
morning, and the mosques and palaces, minarets and cypress
trees of the imperial city looked monochromed and without
substance. Shreds of filthy cloud hung around the Galata
Tower and fishing smacks cast off into an oily, fish-depleted
sea. These were beleaguered commuters contemplating no
postcard view of the city but poorly paid jobs and children to
feed, high rents and medical prescriptions which they could ill
afford. It was Istanbul without the evening lights glimpsed
through sea drizzle, Istanbul infirm and shorn of illusion.
Above me, I heard the seagulls and their cries on the wind as
they dived for bread scraps. The wind was cold and it soon
drove me inside.
A travelling salesman was pitching to the passengers in the
cabin, with considerable success. He was selling what he
described as magic torches, which worked without batteries.
'Ladies and gentlemen, a unique opportunity this morning to
purchase a magic torch. Such a torch that lasts a lifetime. The
perfect camping accessory . . .' It was the camping that sealed
it, opened pockets and purses to make the salesman's morning.
Camping caused crumpled lira notes to change hands as
underpaid, urban people, who would never go camping in all
their life, got kitted up just in case. Camping meant arriving
for these people. Camping meant leaving the big city behind
for a few well-earned days' rest in the country. The camping
torch sustained their hopes for the future, as if planning for
opulence staved off the realities of a low-wage present.So they had not abandoned dreaming. No matter that the
torches were not designed to last; some did not even survive
the crossing. A young girl returned hers to the salesman two
minutes after her mother had bought it, but clearly did not feel
cheated by shoddy goods. All she wanted was a replacement.
It was only expected that her camping dream might remain
intact until they reached the other shore. Then it might be
allowed to flicker and go out. In Istanbul, it was known that
dreams did this.
As the passengers disembarked, the salesman stashed his
lira and busily dug out another box of torches from his bag to
pitch to dreamers on the return voyage.
'A good sale,' I remarked.
He chuckled. 'Lesson one, my friend. I used to tell them
how useful a torch was in power cuts. I got nowhere. Nobody
in Istanbul needs reminding about power cuts.' In this there
was a perverse logic; such was the grinding poverty of these
people that they had given up on fuel bills, repairs, new
clothes, abandoned the purchase of practical essentials before
dreams, as if dreams alone could help them now.
I sought lodgings at the Pera Palas Hotel, Istanbul's belle
epoque glory built to accommodate those wealthy Europeans
from London and Paris who disembarked from the Orient
Express. No such hotel had ever been built for Blue Train
passengers, blue-collar, dust-covered arrivals from the Asian
wastes. This gilt-edged box of a hotel stood on a high period
island while concrete, traffic, and twentieth-century thoroughfares
tore past on all sides as if development and growth had
burst their banks and were threatening to sweep the old hotel
away. Japanese tour parties were racing among the pot plants
and the ottoman couches, admiring the ancient giltwork and
the creaking lift, exploring their sleeping museum. A belly
dancing soiree complete with befezzed attendants was scheduled
for that evening. Meanwhile, the hotel staff were preparing for
a lunchtime fashion parade. But first I had a couple of museums
to visit.At the city's Naval Museum, I found befezzed mannequin
sailors. Twenty-six of them manned Sultan Abdul Aziz's huge
barque. There were another fourteen of them in the barque of
Sultan Abdul Mejid's harem. I had been drawn to them in the
hope that I might be able to examine up close the material and
structure of an original Ottoman fez. But such things were
typically hard to come by, and here the boats were high up,
the fezzes' secrets out of reach. When I tried to explain my
mission to a museum attendant, he merely wagged a finger at
me. So I moved on to the museum's statutory Atattirk Room.
There were pictures of the Gazi as a young officer when first
he entered the War College in Constantinople aged eighteen
and also when he passed out of Staff College as a Staff Captain
in January 1905, aged twenty-three. In both pictures, he was
wearing a fez.
But the most memorable photograph was dated November
22 1931, a winter day in the hinterland town of Amasya, a
place not unlike, and not far from, Kastamonu. The photograph
showed a bare-headed Atattirk staring deep into the eyes
of a turbanned man, old and white bearded with a nut-creviced
face. The two faces are close to each other, and Atattirk is
holding the man by the shoulders, a natural posture for shaking
sense into someone. There is affection there, but there is also
exasperation. I am doing all I can to make you modern, says Ataturk's despairing expression while the old man stares back,
stunned, into the face of his Gazi, two faces looking deep into
the Turkish dilemma that the other represents.
I continued my search for period fezzes at the Military
Museum north of Taksim Square. My ticket was numbered
one, as was the tag I received at the left-luggage desk. Three
receptionists stared aghast at my intrusion. As I moved into
the first exhibit hall, a man in a suit (doubtless numbered one)
appeared from nowhere and latched on to me ten yards back.
I did not need to have experienced tailing to recognize the
feeling for the first time. The man actually coughed nonchalantly
as he fell in behind me.At first, I enjoyed his attentions. He made me feel
important. Perhaps I constituted a threat to Turkish national
security. Incidental music played inside my head. I think 1 in
fact surveyed him more effectively than he did me. I was
aware that he lingered at every corner until my progress
through the exhibits made space for him to advance the
surveillance. His suit was ill fitting and his hair tufted on one
side of his head. One hand spent much of its time patting the
tuft flat. The other hovered above a pocket as if to threaten
with a spank the walkie-talkie tucked there so that it might not
crackle, and thus rumble him with quite such regularity.
Whenever it did so, my tail would make an admirably heroic
effort to ignore it and appear like any normal visitor to the
museum even though, judging by the admission ticket numbers,
no such thing existed.
Being soldiers, the mannequins here could hardly take
refuge from the curious public in high-altitude boats. Instead,
they inhabited glass cases at ground level and stood around as
if in convivial conversation that made light of the fact that they
came from different armies and different periods entirely. A
sergeant in the service of Abdul Aziz (1861-1876) was chatting
animatedly to an officer of Mahmud II (1808-1839) while a
gunner from the reign of Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909) looked
on. What they did have in common were their fezzes. I fished
out my notebook and started to write.
Renewed crackling indicated the frantic relay of information
on the nearby walkie-talkie. The tail had taken cover
behind a late-nineteenth century artillery officer to report that
the subject was at this very moment taking notes on Ottoman
cavalry uniform, and would they please advise.
The exhibits broke the laws not only of conventional time
and space but of social etiquette too. What was that private
daring to suggest to that officer, aside from the fact that a
century separated them? I had seen collections of stuffed birds
which somehow resembled this, where the kittiwake has
inadvertently ended up in a case originally inhabited by thegolden eagle so that it is surrounded not by appropriate fish
and seaweed but by mountain heather and by a freshly
slaughtered lamb that much bigger than itself. So it was with
the soldiers. Their medals and decorations did not seem to
correspond to the descriptions that purported to accompany
them. Generals and guardsmen seemed to have ended up in
each others' uniforms, to have dressed in haste and without
due care, as if a museum cleaner had surprised them late at
night in a moment of unbridled mannequin passion where
differences in rank had served only to arouse.
And then I saw it, my best and perhaps only chance of
examining a period fez close up. In one corner of the hall, a
single mannequin stood unprotected by glass. I set about
losing my tail for the ten seconds I calculated I would need to
remove and examine the fez.
So I led him down the far side of the longest case of
exhibits I could find, slowing my pace considerably so that he
was obliged to do likewise. I figured he would maintain the
pace for some time after I had disappeared from view, allowing
me the time for my investigations. As I disappeared out of his
view around a corner, I beetled silently across the hall to the
mannequin soldier, apologized for the humiliation, and rapidly
removed his fez. But it had been glued to the mannequin's
head so that everything above his neck came off ghoulishly in
my hand. My valiant soldier stood to attention with a three
inch steel peg where his head should have been. In the seconds
that remained, I tried to replace the head but in my rising panic
was quite unable to locate the hole in which the peg lodged.
Suddenly, no time was left to do anything but place the
befezzed head at the feet of the victim and flee through the
nearest door. Another stubborn Turk had just lost his head for
refusing to remove his fez.
And then I forgot fezzes entirely as I realized that I had
stumbled upon one of the museum's unsung glories. I was in
the presence of what looked like the unedited, rough-cut
collection of presidential, prime ministerial, royal, andsheikhly gifts to Kenan Evren, the general who had emerged
from the military coup of 1980 to become the country's
President for much of the decade that followed. There were
plates and plaques, vases and trophies, ornaments and pistols
from all over the world. Highlights included a huge bejewelled
sword from the King of Saudi Arabia and another sword, the
same in every detail, from his brother. Were such repetitions
deliberately modish in Saudi Arabia? Or had heads rolled
among the Saudi advisers responsible for official gifts? And
specifically, would either brother mind if the hard-up Turks
sold one?
There were gifts from the Kuwaitis, the Syrians, the
Bangladeshis, the Malaysians, and the Chinese. There were
machine-guns from Pakistan and revolvers from Albania.
There were presentations from UNESCO, from Yasser
Arafat, and from the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Jerusalem.
What gave the collection a personal relevance, it struck me,
was the fact that I would have none of it in my house. I
wondered how many people had wandered through this hall
and also thought how strange it was that the stewardship of
nations should so regularly be entrusted to people with taste
of such grotesqueness. Since the highlight of the display (a
diplomatic incident in itself), a green frosted-glass vase of
hideous design, had been presented by Romania's Nicolae
Ceaucescu in 1983, one could dismiss as irrelevant parallels
between taste and fitness to govern at one's peril.
As I slipped from the room, I noticed that the mannequin
had not yet been rescued from decapitation. I did not know
how the Turks treated those who dealt thus with their military
heroes, but did not mean to find out. A valedictory crackle
from a walkie-talkie was the final sound I heard as I crossed
the museum compound, gratefully reached the street, and
headed immediately for the anonymity of the city's Covered
Market.
After my experiences with the mannequin, the idea, I
suppose, was to lose myself in the mercantile flow. But whereonce I might have disappeared into the heavy smoke of the
nargilye pipes, amongst piled brocades from Baghdad, shimmering
silks from Bursa, muslins from Bengal, and cashmeres
from Persia, I was reduced to secreting myself among cheap
factory kilims from the Turkish town of Denizli, pirated NafNaf
bags from Istanbul sweat shops, trainers and leather
jackets, backgammon boards and leather pouffes, and to
tussling with slogans emblazoned across T-shirts purporting
to be English, such as Quite War in the Sea, or Green Peas EcoTeam.
On the walls largely obscured by the T-shirts the names
of the market's many gates and alleyways indexed a range
of largely forgotten trades. There were streets called Quilt
makers, Bagmakers, Polishers, Needlemakers, Glassmakers,
Swordmakers, and Shawlmakers. There was Clothes Cleaners,
Bookbinders, Spoonmakers, Goldsmiths, and Jewellers. There
was even a Kalpakmakers' Alley, and a Fezmakers' Street
where over a hundred fez makers, it is said, had worked as late
as the 1920s. Now there was a bank on Fezmakers', and
endless boutiques with credit-card stickers on the doors. There
were serried ranks of jeans and subtle spot-lighting, sharp suits
and the sound of calculations in four or five currencies.
Fezmakers', true to the slavishly slick reinventions of the
twentieth century, had become The Arcade of Those Who
Willingly Take Mastercard.
Eventually I found fezzes on Shawlmakers' Street. A young
man studying to be a lawyer was minding the family shop
while his father recovered from illness.
'You want a fez?' he asked dubiously.
'I want a fez maker.'
He smiled. 'Try the nineteenth century.' He would make a
good lawyer.
'Somebody somewhere must still be making fezzes,' I
insisted.
'You could try Bircan in Konya,' he suggested. 'He makes
a nice fez.''I already have. I was there earlier this week.'
He looked at me over his young lawyer's glasses. 'I see,' he
said. 'You really do want a fez maker.' My persistence apparently
inspired him to leaf through an old ledger. 'You may
be in luck,' he told me. 'I think there is still one fez maker
in Istanbul.' He wrote down an address and sent me on my
way.
His directions led me out of the high-rent confines of the
Covered Market; evidently, the artisans who once worked
there could no longer afford to do so. Retailers had long since
colonized the pricey square-footages of the former workshops.
In modem Istanbul, the graft of those who made things with
their hands could no longer compete with the earning power
of premium salesman's patter. My steps traced the artisans'
retreat into the low-rent labyrinth of obscure, tatty alleyways
beyond the market walls.
I eventually found the fez maker on the second floor of a
lonely building where furtive cats darted at my approach.
There was a faint smell of mildew, and windows rattling in
the draught which disturbed the dust hanging in the shafts of
light above the aged wooden steps. In his tiny room, lengths
of material were piled on tables and shreds of cloth littered the
floor. Two daughters were bent over antique sewing machines.
A gas fire puttered in the comer, and in the Turkish fashion a
mug of water was hung by a wire hook from the fire-grille to
stop the air from drying out, as if, I imagined, it might
otherwise crack and fall in noisy pieces to the floor.
His name was Garbis Bey. He was an elderly, miniature
Armenian with shock-white hair and kindly eyes crouching
behind thick glasses.
'You're the fez maker?' I asked. All three, I noticed, were
working on flat brimless hats made from a bright orange and
blue patterned material of the sort that Fevzi Bircan had so
disdainfully described.
Garbis Bey threw up his arms. 'In a manner of speaking,'
he replied. 'These days, everybody - America, England,Canada, Sweden - seems to want patterned hats like this. Or
waistcoats of the same material. But, yes, I suppose I am still
a fez maker.'
The younger daughter looked up from her work. 'Of
course you are, Father,' she reassured him.
'Are you going to make fezzes today?' I asked him. I
explained how much I wanted to see a fez being made, the fez
that Fevzi Bircan's arthritic back had denied me, before they
were made no more.
Garbis Bey looked apologetic. 'Come with me,' he said,
placing a disproportionately large hand in mine and leading
me along a chilly corridor. He stopped in front of a door and
turned a large key in the lock. We stepped inside. As my eyes
adjusted to the weak light, I could see that it was a fez
repository. 1 had never seen so many fezzes in my life. They
stood in wobbly stacks against the walls, fez stalagmites rising
to the ceiling among lesser formations that strove for space at
my feet. They lay horizontal along shelves, tubes of fezzes
wrapped in brown paper which in some cases had split open
and spilled on to the floor.
'You want to see a fez being made,' he said. 'You have
been all the way to Konya to do so. And I want to see a fez
being sold. Because of this' - he surveyed his massive overstock
with concern - 'we have not made any for several
months. Perhaps we shall not make any more.' Only as we
reached the warmth of the workshop did I notice that Garbis
Bey was still holding my hand.
"Will you be sorry?' I asked him, and he laughed.
'It is my main product line,' he explained, 'so of course I
shall be sorry. But I was very young when the fez was
abolished. And we Christians were among the first to adopt
hats. I remember my father choosing a homburg. The flat cap
was rather villagey for his taste.'
'Well, I for one like your main product line,' I remarked
by way of consolation before I could suppress the sentiment.
But it was too late.Typically, Garbis Bey took my words as a lead to present me
with a fez. He wrapped a tape around my head and dispatched
his younger daughter to the repository with the measurements
'But, Garbis Bey,' I pointed out as he placed the fez upon
my head, 'I am your only end customer.'
'In which case,' he smiled, 'I must treat you with care.'
They bade me goodbye. I reached the bottom of the stair and arrived at the entrance to the street. I hesitated. To remove
it now would have shamed me. So I took a deep breath
pushed open the door, and for the first time walked out into
Turkey with a fez upon my head.
I did not last very long. Within seconds I realized that I had
never felt so uncomfortable on account of a hat. Heads in the
crowd turned on every side. A policeman asked whether I was
a tourist. I replied that of course I was. Why else would I be
wearing a fez? More such questions and my room at the Pera
Palas would soon come under suspicion and with very good
reason, for it soon would harbour two fezzes and a sikke, and
all in the hotel where Ataturk had stayed. Fearful of an incident
to rank with Bursa's hundred and fourteen packages, I chose a
quiet moment to remove the fez, and hurriedly concealed it in
my bag.
I was just yards from the Pera Palas when a demonstration
outside the American Consulate held me up. Hundreds of
women draped from head to toe in black, wearing black chadors and carrying black umbrellas, were separated from the Consulate
by lines of policemen with machine-guns. Slogans,
picked out in white on the umbrellas, variously accused
America of being the 'Big Satan', told her to stop interfering,
to stop being imperialistic, and railed at Bush despite the fact
that Clinton had been sworn in three weeks earlier.
'An all-female demonstration,' I remarked to the receptionist
at the Pera Palas.
'The police might perhaps be inclined to behave a little
differently if there were men among them,' the receptionist
put it diplomatically.'Why the trouble?'
'Bosnia,' he said. 'They're upset about Bosnia.' It was a
prelude to the major rally planned for the next day.
I wandered into the hotel dining-room. Here, with only a
few walls and not a hundred yards between them and the
demonstration, another group of Turkish women were
expressing their own antithetical interests, perhaps with less
anger, but with equal fervour and certainly more dress sense.
In a range of outfits that included orange hotpants, chiffon
tops, and lacy shifts they cruised up and down the catwalk,
their faces arrogant and beautiful, but it was as if only the
thump of Western music from the banks of speakers kept the
chants of 'America the Big Satan' at bay.
That night, modern Turkey's crusade would continue with
a touristic entertainment at the Pera Palas, doubtless along the
lines of the previous evening's show at the Ciragan, a luxury
Istanbul hotel where once a Sultan's palace had stood. The
Ciragan event, as reported in the daily newspaper Freedom, was captured in a single photograph that immediately
reminded me of another. A young male tourist, French and
stripped to the waist, stared into the eyes of a belly dancer as if
to defy, and simultaneously enhance, the lurid provocation of
her breasts jiggling inches from his throat. Of course, it
reminded me of Atattirk and the old man of Amasya in the
other photo, these two faces locked on each other across the
photograph, a reminder served especially by the juxtaposition
of turban in one case, and fez in the other.
Only this time, the fez wearer was a tourist and he wore it
for fun. And the predicament of this fez, humiliated by its
proximity to pseudo-oriental sleaze, would no doubt have
delighted Atattirk. In the photograph, the fez has been press
ganged into serving a world it had always opposed, the same
place that Fevzi Bircan was going. The fez had become a
laughing-stock, it had finally become a silly hat, and as such
its demise might now be considered official.
But when the fashion show packed up, the sound ofwomen in black railing at America could once more be heard
in all its persistence beyond the hotel windows. It was a sound
that would not go away, and in it I realized that the demise of
the fez had not remade the people, not all the people, and
much that the hat once stood for was still out there beyond the
windows of the Pera Palas, stalking Turkey.chapter fifteen




The morning of the Bosnia Rally broke chilly and bright,
light flooding in from the sea to span the brief day. Turks were
gathering in their thousands in Taksim Square, where Istanbul's
marches and demonstrations traditionally came to a head,
often murderous and bloody.
But today, the fighting would remain elsewhere. Turks
across Istanbul thought of Sarajevo, of that city's razed mosques
and desecrated cemeteries. In their minds, they saw gun
toting Serbs wearing crucifixes and nationalistic young Russians
signing up for the defence of Slavic brother Serbia.
Bitterly, they reflected on how the West was failing them, and
remembered Turkish gastarbeiters immolated in the towns, their
factories now empty, of eastern Germany, and Turks across
Istanbul left their homes and set out for Taksim Square.
A line of police in riot gear was frisking arrivals at the head
of Independence Street. By the entrance to the square, hawkers
were selling Turkish flags and scarves emblazoned with the
words Greater Turkey. Islands of pragmatism in this sea of
idealism, they were also selling the scarves of Besiktas and
Galatasaray, two Istanbul football clubs who were playing
each other that day. There were thousands here, perhaps not
as many thousands as had been predicted, but whenever
thousands of Turks forgo the grudge match, the big local
derby, it is indication of how much they care. And the Turks
of Istanbul had cared before.
On October 5 1908, Emperor Franz Josef of Austria had
announced the annexation of Bosnia. The Austro-Hungarians
had been administering the territory since 1880, but only underlicence; it officially remained an Ottoman possession.
Emotionally, as the people of Constantinople were forcibly to
demonstrate, Bosnia remained Ottoman beyond dispute.
Autumn was already in the air on the day of Franz Josef's
announcement. The plane trees along the Bosphorus were
beginning to show the first indications of turning, the leaves
tinkling brittle against the wind in which chill strains jostled
amongst the fading notes of summer. Word of the Austrian
annexation soon reached the quayside, where Ali the son of
Mehmet was at work. Blockades, it was rumoured, were
being organized outside the Austrian shops in Pera. Ali the son
of Mehmet joined an incensed posse of dockers to march across
Galata Bridge and lend their support to the blockades.
By October 8, all of the capital's Austrian shops had
effectively been closed down. Once prospective customers
discovered that shops were Austrian, they willingly turned
away to seek their purchases elsewhere. Delivery carts with
nowhere to go stood laden in the streets. On October 10, a
proclamation cemented the blockade by calling on all Ottomans
to embargo 'the loathsome goods of Austria'. Austrian
stores were blacklisted on posters which were stickered to the
walls of homes, offices, and mosques.
Depositors organized a run on the Bank of Vienna in
Constantinople. Bosnian Muslims gathered above Galata
Bridge and marched through Pera denouncing the annexation.
Ali joined dockers and porters to prevent the Galicia, an
Austrian steamer, from embarking six hundred passengers at
the docks.
The anger ran deep. Ali had been a docker for many years
but considered himself to have been an Ottoman for longer.
He and his colleagues refused to work the Austrian cargoes
even though their stand meant significant wage cuts; Ali's four
children would go hungry that winter. One evening, in the
depths of winter, he and his colleagues were approached by an
Austrian agent offering them tempting sums of money to
unload a cargo that lay stranded on the quayside. Whenquestioned closely, the agent eventually admitted what the
boxes contained. Contemptuously, Ali and his mates rejected
the Austrian's bribe out of hand. In no circumstances would
they unload fezzes.
Nine-tenths of all fezzes sold in Turkey at that time were
imported from Austria. After sugar, the fez was Austria's
second biggest export to Turkey. Soon, the people of Turkey
were discarding their Austrian-made fezzes and replacing them
with Turkish ones. As early as October 10, the fez factory at
Eyup had dramatically stepped up production to make up for
the anticipated shortfall.
In December that year, thousands of Austrian fezzes were
torn to pieces in front of the Customs House at Smyrna. The
boycott spread as far afield as Trabzon and even Beirut. The
embargo, said to be costing Franz Josef's empire five thousand
crowns a week, caused the Austrian fez industry to collapse.
Settlement soon saw to it that the Austrians got to keep Bosnia
but Ottoman coffers were handsomely replenished and
Imperial pride restored. But not before Ali the son of Mehmet,
who kept an Austrian fez at home for special occasions such as bayrams and the imminent circumcision of his second son, had
taken it from a shelf one morning and carried it down to the
docks. Strange how he normally wore this hat to demonstrate
his Ottoman loyalties, he thought, as he took it from its bag
and flung it into the Bosphorus. For a while, it floated upside
down amongst shards of winter ice before a wave scuttled it
and sent it gently to the bottom.
Today history was repeating itself as the great-grandchildren
of those same dockers, now with surnames,
gathered in Taksim Square to carry the flag for Bosnia just as
their forebears had done during the fez embargo. Above the
heads of the Taksim crowd flew the green flags of Islam and
the red flags of Turkey. Bosnia, placards proclaimed, was
Turkish and Islamic. Bosnia belonged. English-language placards
were articulate in spite of themselves: We are all Probable
Bosnians, one read. Serbs Shoot West Speak; Where are HumanRights; How Many Auschwitzes have to be Witnessed; Attention
America -- there is oil in Bosnia; and We can Come suddenly. We
die for our Religion brothers, said others. 'We die for Sarajevo',
the chant went up from a group of young men, and the sound
was carried to that distant city, ringed by Serbian guns.
But beyond the sound of those guns were the echoes of
history. It was 1937. The writer and traveller Rebecca West
was in Sarajevo on the eve of a visit to the city by the Turkish
Prime Minister, Ismet Inonii, he whose new surname recalled
his great victory in battle against the Greeks. The visit created
a buzz of anticipation among Sarajevo's thirty thousand Muslims,
who had always cherished their links with the Ottoman
Empire and were anxious to demonstrate their loyalties to its
young offspring. The night before Inonii's visit had been a
busy one. The men could be seen queueing outside the fez
shops among clouds of steam. When the turn of each came,
his crumpled fez was clamped on to a fez-shaped cone heated
like an iron. Another cone was laid on top of the fez and
screwed down tight. Once the fez had been returned to pristine
shape by the steam iron, the attendant released it with what
West described as a 'motherly expression'.
The next day, thousands of Bosnian Muslims were to
discover that the Prime Minister of Turkey had anything but a
motherly expression for their fezzes. Accompanied by his War
Minister, Inonii looked out over a sea of fezzes - wearing a
bowler. The Prime Minister, whose country was busy making
its ideological bed elsewhere, pointedly ignored the green flags
of Islam flying from a nearby building, made no reference in
his speech to the ancient ties that bound Bosnia and Turkey,
and instead commended the Muslims of Sarajevo to the
fledgeling Yugoslav ideal.
But by February 1993, that ideal had long since taken root,
even briefly flowered, but was now being crushed on the wheel
of vicious, competing nationalisms. In Taksim Square, the
President of Turkey rose to the accompanying roar of the
thousands gathered to hear him. As he spoke, it was as if hewere making up for lost time, erasing the sentiments of the
Turkish Republic's first Prime Minister half a century earlier
in Sarajevo. Only three months later, Turgut Ozal would die
of a sudden heart attack. But today and despite the disapproval
of his own Prime Minister, he stressed the ties that bound
them, the people of Turkey and the Muslims of Bosnia, acknowledged Islam and history, the green and red flags flying
on all sides, and for a moment it was as if he might finally
make swansong mention of the fez, the hat that Inonii's bowler
had summarily dismissed fifty-five years earlier.
The demonstration came to a head with relentless chants of
'Troops to Bosnia' and 'Embargo on Armenia', and I slipped
away as the crowds broke up and streamed down the hill towards the ferries. Mannequins dressed like Europeans looked
out from the shop windows. The anger of the demonstrators
was lost beneath the first utterance of the muezzins cutting
through the cold, smoky air as the light faded above Istanbul.
The short winter day was over.
Springchapter sixteen




The hotel receptionist with rheumy eyes shook his head. 'Un chapeau turc,' he pronounced definitively. Outside, dawn
was breaking. Gusts of wind arrived without warning, rifling
through the date palms.
'You're seriously telling me that this city has nothing to do
with it?'
'Pour les origines du tarbouche,' he reiterated, 'for the fez, il
faut alter a Turquie.'
'But I've just come from there.'
'Tur-quie,' the Moroccan repeated in a non-negotiable singsong,
handing me a room key. He might as well have denied
hamburgers in Hamburg, sherry in Jerez. I was in Fez, and in
the namesake city nobody wanted to know.
Weeks earlier, I had rung the Egyptian Tourism Office in
London with the same question.
'From Turkey,' the man had replied unequivocally.
'But the Turks did not introduce it until the 1820s,' I protested. 'You Egyptians were wearing it well before
then.'
'No, no,' the Egyptian insisted, aghast at the idea. 'Definitely
a Turkish hat.' And, by way of signalling the end of my
enquiry, he offered to send me some brochures.
The Encyclopaedia of Islam agrees. 'A red cap worn by the
Turks,' it states. 'A Turkish flat-topped cap', my dictionary
insists. The traveller Charles Doughty described it as the
'Turkey Red Cap' during his travels through the Arabian
Desert in the late 1800s. But modern Turkey blamed it on the
Greeks, and the Ottomans had named it after a Moroccan city,
which had never even been Ottoman. What was behind this
Oriental denial?
For at its prestigious apogee, they would doubtless have
squabbled amongst themselves to establish the origins of this
hat as their own. Even as the Ottoman Empire had receded
through the nineteenth century, the fez pushed on undaunted
to colonize new territories. Not only was it established across
the Maghreb, the Levant, and the Balkans, but also into
Afghanistan and as far afield as India. In its heyday, the fez in
Morocco extended far south beyond Marrakech, where there
was a fez factory. Such was its popularity in Tunisia (there
was another fez factory in Tunis) that the custom of the late
nineteenth century was to collect fezzes and wear two or more
at a time.
The fez penetrated into the heart of Africa on the heads of
Arab traders who ventured inland across the deserts from the
Maghreb or sailed south down the Red Sea and East African
coasts before heading into the interior through modern Tanzania.
The Ottomans introduced the fez to the Sudanis on their
forays south from Egypt. Later the King's African Rifles,
originally recruited by the British from Sudani tribesmen,
adopted the fez as part of their uniform and rose every morning
to the sound of the Turkish Reveille. In his Historical Encyclopaedia
of Costume, 1888, Albert Racinet claimed: 'The majority of
the native inhabitants of Timbuctoo are negroes, but alongside
them live Arabs and Moors who stay in North Africa for
business reasons. As a result, the local costumes are similar to
those worn on the Mediterranean coast of the African continent.'
There was a time, Racinet was implying, when the fez
had been established at the figurative end of the world.
But today nobody was collecting fezzes, and the hat had
come to such a pass that it was being denied in the city from
which it had taken its name.
'But you admit that Moroccans wear it,' I persisted
doggedly with the hotel receptionist as he sought refuge in his
ledgers.'Pas beaucoup,' he answered. 'Here in Fez, in Tetouan near
by, and the surrounding area maybe. Elsewhere, no longer.'
Above the reception desk hung a portrait of King Hassan.
Fezless, he was dressed in sunglasses and T-shirt, and was
holding a golf club.
Outside the hotel, spring rain clouds were trundling across
the sky above distempered walls, flower pots, and filigree
balcony railings. A man in a fez had hoisted his jellabaa gown
up above his ankles and was stepping daintily between the
puddles.
'But this is a curious subject, Monsieur,' said Aziz once I
had explained my purpose. He was a smiling man whose tiny
bones cracked when I shook his hand and whose thick eyebrows
wriggled whenever he spoke, like impassioned bodies
beneath bedclothes. He was a tourist guide, encouraged by the
tourism ministry to wear the fez when working.
'Otherwise,' he said, 'I would never wear it, this fez, what
we know as the tarboosh.'
'Even in Fez, the city where it all began?'
'You are sure of that, Monsieur?'
'I am no longer sure of very much, Aziz.'
'Well, let us go and find out,' said Aziz amid a climactic
activity of eyebrows.
The walls of the medina, Fez's magical covered market,
rose to swallow us. Suddenly, I was amongst people crowding
in on all sides, and I was immediately aware of weathered
stonework and cigarette smoke unfurling, and bewitching,
layered smells in which nothing distinct could at first be
identified.
According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the fez was so
named because it was first manufactured here. More specifically,
according to the Britannica, Fez had long had a monopoly
on fez manufacture, 'for it was supposed that the dye which
imparts the dull crimson hue of these caps and which is
obtained from the juice of a berry which grows in large
quantities near the town could not be procured elsewhere'.'Close,' said Aziz as I tried to keep pace with him, dodging
expertly between the swirling currents of market activity. 'But
not quite. Poppies, not berries. But by the mid-nineteenth
century, they were increasingly using artificial dyes anyway.'
'And the colour?' shouted Aziz above the hubbub. 'What
does the colour mean to you?' In Turkey, I told him, it was
considered to have originated from the slaves of North Africa's
Roman colonies, who were given red caps on their emancipation
as a sign of their freedom.
Aziz disagreed. 'Red has very positive associations in Islam,
and Fez is Morocco's most religious and cultured city. That's
what the colour means,' he told me with a guide's unwavering
certainty. Perhaps he was right, but I was rather inclined to
believe that proud Aziz did not like being reminded that
Moroccans had once been slaves. Besides, in Turkey, the fez's
old associations with liberty against a background of sartorial
enslavement, made for splendid irony, and the theory was
irresistible.
As we penetrated further into the medina, my senses
focused and the smells began to disentangle. There were huge
sheaves of mint for making tea, and fresh whitewash daubed
against the walls. Cattle urine ran steaming from a puddle in a
beaded line across the earth before being trodden into the dust.
I caught the first whiffs of the gag-making stench of the
tannery. I was tracking Aziz by means of his red fez, a beacon
bobbing conspicuously above the crowd. I lost him in the
thrilling moment I saw what I had come for. For a second, it
seemed as if Aziz was everywhere; and then I understood that
they were old men in faded fezzes on every side lingering by
the spice stalls, grouped outside the mosques. Around the
bases of their fezzes, I could see the discolorations caused by
the sweat of summer, brown ripples set down as if by a
receding tide.
A hand tugged at my arm. 'You should not stare, you
know. At least, that is what you Europeans are always telling
us. Don't worry, you'll see plenty more.' Aziz led me througha tinkling door into a half-lit shop. At Berrada et Tahri,
Fabrication de Tarbouch, an elderly man was flipping through a
ledger of invoices, a licked forefinger turning the pages. Motes
of dust hung in the air. On the wall was a portrait of King
Hassan, and this time he was wearing a fez, the only Middle
Eastern leader to do so.
'Turkey, I believe,' the elderly man replied to Aziz's
question.
'But it's named after a Moroccan town,' I objected.
'Not here it isn't. Here it's known as a tarboosh.' The man at Berrada et Tahri had been making fezzes, just
as his father had done, for forty-two years. Was his son likely
to?
'Our monarchy is very well established,' he replied, 'and
the signs are that the heir to the throne will continue in his
father's traditional ways. That will mean wearing what you
call the fez. So, yes, there will be work for my son.' So the
king's endorsement would suffice to keep it going. On important
occasions such as circumcision ceremonies aged five or six,
the yearly feast to mark the end of the Ramadan fast, and on
wedding days, many of Morocco's young men would continue
to wear the Turkey Red Cap.
'But only on a handful of special days in the course of their
lives?' I asked.
The man nodded. 'These elderly men you see in the
medina, always they are being buried, and as the middle-aged
men become elderly, fewer and fewer are wearing fezzes out of
daily habit. Our younger customers are not likely to wear out
their fezzes. We cannot, I mean, expect much repeat business.'
'And where do you make them?' I asked, in the hope that I
might finally see a fez being made.
'Manufacture,' the elderly man corrected my verb, leaning
across the table to a pile of cloths. They were felt pieces, mass
produced and rough cut to size, which needed no more than
shaping on moulds before the linings and tassles were attached.
The felts came from factories in Brazil and Czechoslovakia.The elderly man shrugged. 'The tarboosh may be old
fashioned,' he said, 'but these days we make it in the modern
world.'
'So,' said Aziz happily, our mission accomplished to his
satisfaction. 'Turkey. Shall we go?'
But just before leaving, a man in a fez popped his head
through the door at Berrada et Tahri.
'Hey, Abdul,' said the shopkeeper. 'There's a man here
wants to know where tarbooshes came from.'
'Andalucia,' replied Abdul unhesitatingly. 'When we Arabs
ran it.'
From then on, it went badly for Aziz. As the certitudes
he thought to have delivered up to me haemorrhaged at
every corner, he experienced something like a grievous loss of
faith.
'Oh no,' another fez wearer exclaimed when we stopped
him in the street. 'It came from Saudi Arabia with the Moors
when they migrated this way in the ninth century. Definitely.'
'That's untrue,' said another. 'I heard it originated in
military headgear when this was a Roman province.'
One hour later, Aziz and I collapsed over glasses of mint
tea. We had now collected Turkey, Andalucia, Saudi Arabia,
and the Romans as possible origins of the fez. To which we
could add the Turkish belief that it came from the Greeks, and
the claim - albeit apparently unwanted - of this the namesake city.
'Now,' I said, thinking back to Konya's dervishes. 'Do you
want to hear my theory?'
Aziz shook his head. He had had enough of theories. The
more we asked, the more obfuscated the origins of the fez
became. The guide in Aziz was looking for digestible titbits of
certainty.
'You do not have your answer, Monsieur,' he said, the
bedroom activity of his eyebrows stilled for once as if he had
failed me. But I patted him on the shoulder, thinking that
perhaps I did, even if it was not the answer I had sought.'Oh,' said the receptionist smugly as I checked out early
the next morning. ' Vous partez pour le Turquie!'
'Indirectly,' I replied, paid my bill, and walked down to
the station. Dawn was breaking purple above the city as the
train heaved and rolled gradually forward. The rain came
down as we left the outskirts behind us, scattering among the
leaves of the lemon trees and puddling on the mud-ochre
earth. At the junction at Sidi Slimane, passengers bound for
Tangiers disembarked while the train slid south-west towards
Casablanca. Young men stood around in leather jackets. I
heard one, wearing a T-shirt on which was printed the message
'Hard Rock Cafe, Orlando', discuss virtual reality in English
with a friend.
A man stood at a distance, further down the platform, in
the rain. He was not of the English-speaking world, of virtual
reality and the Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando. The rain coursed
off his old fez, returning the faded maroon to its original dark
purple. I had come here to trace the fez's origins, but what I
think I had discovered about this denied and marginalized hat
were its imminent endings.
This was the hat that had once colonized Timbuctoo. The
hat that Tunisians had once gone so far as to collect had gone
into terminal decline. Generally, only guides and staff in the
more touristy hotels still wore them. In Tunis, the Souk des
Chechias, the Tunisian fez market, stood empty, a backwater
amidst the currents of commerce. In Lebanon, where the fez
was still manufactured on a small scale, its use was restricted
to 'a few old whitebeards dreaming of happier times'. In Syria,
it had been out of fashion since the late fifties and only
remained the habit of some Muslim clerics who wrapped it
with a turban, and some elderly notables including the President
of the Union of the Syrian Chambers of Commerce. In
Egypt, a few workshops were still making it for the tourist
trade in Cairo's Khan el Khalili, the city's Grand Bazaar. From
Libya came a few unconfirmed reports of a scarlet fez topped
with a beret-like button of felt. Among the old colonialhouseholds of Kenya it was occasionally retained as the uniform
of the servants. In Greece a long floppy fez with a thick
tassle was used as part of the ceremonial military uniform. In
Bosnia it was still used by clerics and, to a slight degree,
among the more militant Islamic nationalists. And in Morocco,
habitual use of the fez was giving way to special occasions,
and in that retreat were intimations of extinction. Now the
only Moroccan fez I had seen outside the medina of the city
that bore its name was perched upon the grizzled head of an
old man standing, uncomprehending, in the rain. I put him at
eighty years old.
He too would soon be swept away, he and his fez, by the
indifferent currents of history and progress. He would go the
way of Island Castle, that Ottoman rockpool, haven of faded
fezzes, nargilye pipes, and rose-petal jam that Patrick Leigh
Fermor had stumbled upon at the point where Romania,
Bulgaria, and former Yugoslavia met.
Not long ago, they had built a hydro-electric dam on the
Danube a few miles downstream of Island Castle. The waters
had risen, slowly at first but with an increasing appetite, until
they lapped at abandoned tea houses and the empty mosque,
seeped under the doors and rose to cover the windows. The
water rose up the drainpipes and gathered in gutters that would
never empty again, climbed steadily up the roof tiles, and rose
until only the crescent of the minaret remained. And then that
too was gone, leaving a confetti of rose petals and a few faded
fezzes to float for some final moments above the waters of
Western progress.chapter seventeen




The three had been at school together. Now that they were
in their late thirties, only those friendships reminded them that
they had once been children and the short holiday that they
took together every spring grew in importance as each year
passed. For a few days, they might laugh at the fading
memories until they were returned to them as if new, and the
laughter would soothe the rapid passage of the years.
For a few days, amiable Sadi would no longer feel lonely
in the space of his Istanbul bachelorhood, with his wrecked
head of hair and ballooning paunch. A generous light would
fill Mustafa's proviso eyes and the pains in his chest that fed
on worry and cigarettes would not trouble him. His two
friends would tease him about his resemblance, with his thick
black beard and hawkish features, to the gunmen of Beirut,
but he enjoyed the teasing. Only when he was left to himself
did the resemblance start to worry at him. Ismail would
welcome his old friends from almost a thousand miles away in
distant Istanbul, and in their company the longueurs of his life
in a frontier town of south-eastern Turkey would be temporarily
lifted. For the schoolfriends, summer was four spring
days in Van.
It was a beautiful afternoon in May. In the obscurity of his
ground-floor office, hemmed in by buildings and passing
traffic, it struck Ismail that he had not heard the glockenspiel
sounds of the Aygaz delivery van, the song of the Turkish
winter, for days now. After the rigours of a winter at five
thousand feet, he noticed these seasonal indicators. Like a
flower with an instinct for sunlight, the darkness of Ismail'soffice had caused him to seek out the town's vantage points
until he knew by rote every street corner with views beyond
the city limits, every second-storey office and cafe where he
could watch the snow on the mountains receding day by
spring day, sidling up the valleys and screes as the sunshine
pushed back the evidence of winter until only the high, sunless
gullies offered it refuge, and mud smoked in the bright
warmth, feeding roadside rivulets of melt.
Today his friends were in town and the vantage points
were not enough. Ismail called up Sadi and Mustafa, and
suggested an outing to the lake. They took Ismail's red pickup.
The radio played the theme from Love Story as they sped
along the water's edge, and they let it play despite their
suspicions that deep inside each might be laughing at the others
for it. To the right, the lake ran to the distant feet of snowcapped
volcanic peaks. To the left, the hills rose more gradually
from the lakeshore, permitting a few snatched fields of
yellow-green and spiky young trees in early leaf before the
contours bunched together into a mean, unrelenting ascent.
I was standing at a nearby jetty a few miles down the road,
eyeing a boat suspiciously. I was the only prospective passenger
and the skipper was talking an extortionate price.
'I'll wait for some other passengers,' I told him.
'Not this time of day you won't,' he replied, flicking away
the stub of a cigarette. 'They all come in the morning.' But
just then three men drew up in a red pick-up from which
sounded the tinkling notes of the theme from Love Story. One
of them, I noticed, was fat. Another looked as if he had taken
hostages in his time.
And so we met on the boat to Akdamar Island, a favourite
escape for the people of Van. Now that summer was on the
way they would soon take to the boats with their picnics and
barbecues, and clamber ashore for a day in the sunshine. While
the children swam in the icy water and the men smoked
cigarettes and took their ease, the women would cook, turning
kebabs on skewers in the shade of the almond trees.The old cutter drifted towards the island across water in
which was mirrored in perfect detail the mountains and the
snow, and the lilac-coloured almond blossom partially concealing
the sunlit terracotta ruins of a conically domed building.
The prospect was so beautiful as to be highly improbable,
as if the surroundings existed merely in dreams. We were
crossing a great volcanic lake of a depth unknown but of
waters so filled with mineral sodas that the clothes our
helmsman trailed from the stern emerged transformed,
bleached clean. Where the bows of the cutter disturbed the
reflection, throwing out great ripples, we could see between
them into a darkness without end in which we might lose
ourselves. Lake Van did not have many fish, but cats that did
not believe this were known to prowl the shore, with eyes
each of a different colour. We stepped ashore among the
whisperings of birds and insects, the air freighted with the
scent of blossom. Once upon a time, they had called this place
Vaspurakan. So unearthly was it that no other name would
have done.
And then the plane came, so low that I did not hear its
thunderous engines until it was overhead, casting over the
island on its approach to the airport a black shadow that
lingered chill long after the plane was gone. It was a military
transporter; I could clearly make out the markings among its
camouflaged, khaki-brown confusions. As it disappeared,
reducing towards a black spot far down the lake, I sensed a
reminder being served; that even amongst the blossoms of
Vaspurakan, real life was liable to intrude.
I had flown into Van only that morning. Military transporters
were parked on every side of the airport. As we walked
towards the tiny terminal building, two distinct groups were
taking shape on the tarmac. To one side, some thirty men
were resolving themselves with an uncertainty, hoping that
they might regard themselves as a welcoming committee but
suspecting they should actually accept that they were there to
be inspected. They were falling into line, running handsthrough their hair for the last time and patting at rumples in
their jackets. Government department employees, they fixed
their eyes upon a mandarin of apparent consequence and the
attentive retinue that scraped and bowed its way across the
tarmac around him. The mandarin reached the employees and
worked his way down the line, cursorily shaking hands with
each of them as they inclined towards him. And then he was
gone, spirited into the warm interior of a waiting black
Mercedes, leaving the thirty men to stand down and break
into puddles of unmotivated manpower reaching deep into
pockets for cigarettes, each wondering how his handshake had
gone. And so their morning passed.
The other group was of younger men. They were conscript
soldiers headed for military service. They had been issued with
uniforms that did not fit too well, and with cropped haircuts,
but their luggage remained pathetically their own. Some had
suitcases with broken locks that were encradled with blue
twine; others flaunted pirated status symbols such as Benetton
holdalls. One forlorn character carried two plastic bags, one
blue, one pink, with a single trouser leg hanging sorrowfully
from the top of the pink one. They were waiting for nothing
so much as a handshake, only the barked order from their
commanding officer to board the transporter.
As they waited, two dead soldiers passed in front of them.
A pair of green-shrouded coffins had been lowered from the
hold of another transporter, shouldered by a duty of soldiers
and borne slowly to a waiting military ambulance. As the
coffins passed, all the fresh conscripts stiffened to attention as
if by instinct, all except with the boy with the plastic bags,
who bent respectfully to tuck away the errant trouser leg.
And so I wandered up the jetty at Akdamar, the place of
Turkish forgetting. The island was a sunlit fairy kingdom,
planted out with trees in blossom and tall headstones inscribed
in an unfamiliar script. The friezes on the walls of the domed
building standing on a shoulder of the island were like a text
from a fabulous story that had nothing to do with the patheticsignificance of handshakes in the pursuit of modest departmental
preferment, or the coffins of young conscripts. Instead,
there were lions, snakes, angels, and dragons, horses, dogs,
gazelles, and oxen, eagles, turkeys, cocks, and bulls. But there
was a problem in fairyland. The building, its pink sandstone
walls absorbing the warm sunlight, was a church. And it was
Armenian.
Even those around me who had recently ignored the
military transporter, I thought, would surely have to acknowledge
the awkward realities enshrined in this building. But
jovial Sadi, whose portly presence accompanied me through
the ruins of the church, taught me a lesson in forgetting.
'Selcuk,' he said, identifying the architecture of the building
to his satisfaction. And with it, his mind was neatly delivered
of any Armenian problem. By simple extension, the nearby
headstones and the bodies which lay beneath them were no
longer Armenian, and the town of Van no longer had troublesome
Armenian connections. Sadi had airbrushed Armenia out
of his life.
How had it come to this, that decent Turks like Sadi could
refashion the evidence of bricks and mortar so that their
absolving view of national history might prevail? The Armenians,
perhaps three million strong in the nineteenth century,
had lived under Ottoman sovereignty for hundreds of years.
But their tragedy was to be located on the Ottoman periphery
where the Christian Russians were always seeking to gain
influence. In the nineteenth century Russia increasingly portrayed
herself as champion of the oppressed Armenians.
During the Great War there were those Armenians who
intrigued to advance the Russian cause. The Russians captured
Van and held it from 1915 to 1917.
Then the Bolshevik Revolution radically reshaped priorities
in occupied Van. Suddenly, atheist Russia was no longer
interested in old-fashioned notions such as Christian solidarity.
Her new credo being workers, she promptly withdrew from
Van, leaving the way free for the Turks to return, slaughter attheir leisure what they saw as its fifth-column residents, and
torch the place.
In my exasperation, I wondered what I could say to Sadi
of all this: that well-documented charges against his country
alleged that between 1915 and 1918 some one and a half million
Armenians had been slaughtered by Ottoman troops in eastern
Turkey. I guessed that Sadi was too well entrenched in his
forgetting to acknowledge the testimony of surviving Armenians,
those who had witnessed victims tied together as if in a
necklace and thrown into eastern Turkey's fast-flowing rivers
after one had been shot to become the millstone which would
ensure, eventually, that all would drown. I chose not to tell
him that the accounts of all those beheadings, those firing
squads and rapes, were widely believed in the West. I did not
tell him what was known of the deportations, forced marches
through the Anatolian mountains to end in mass graves deep
in the deserts of northern Syria. I only told him that the
building on Akdamar was actually built three hundred years
before the Selcuks. Besides, if he were right, perhaps he could explain why the Muslim Selcuks had built themselves a church.
Assuming he accepted it was a church in which we were
standing. After a long pause, Sadi nodded slowly. It was a
church.
There is a conspicuous innocence in the Turkish spirit, a
sincere belief in the highest of ideals that cannot countenance
the possibility of such a holocaust. The Turkish refrain most
sincerely expressed is 'We are all people', articulating a fervent
belief in common humanity. 1915 is remembered as the year
of Ataturk's defence of Gallipoli, the anvil of heroism on
which the Turkish state was later forged. Turks find quite
unpalatable the idea that in the same year the blueprint for the
Final Solution was being fashioned at the other end of their
country. And so Sadi and people like him have picknicked on
Armenian islands until the island appears Turkish, and history
is reordered to their satisfaction.
In libraries over the years, among travellers' diaries andmemoirs, mouldering pages of dog-eared print and sepia
photographs, I had found unsensational accounts that had
served to convince me. Not accounts that detailed atrocities
against Armenians, but mere cameos compelling in their very
ordinariness told by priests and adventurers, mercenaries and
writers, painters and eccentrics, old soldiers and aristocrats
providing a simple accumulation of unexceptional references
to Armenians living their lives in nineteenth-century towns
and villages all over eastern Turkey until the frequency of them led to the question: where, then, are the Armenians now?
For there was a time when Armenians lived all over
Turkey, particularly in the east, as every nineteenth-century
traveller remarked. There is the Armenian banker in the central
Turkish town of Afyon, or Opium, who affronts the writer
Professor Ramsay in 1883 by charging 5% of the value of a
cheque to cash it (Impressions of Turkey, 1897). There is
Frederick Burnaby's Armenian doctor in Tokat, educated in
the States and speaking with a Yankee drawl; there is the
peasant throwing a wedding party north of Van; the woman
by the edge of Lake Van stitching a shirt for a passing sergeant;
the young shopkeeper jailed in Erzincan for a married woman's
love of him (On Horseback Through Asia Minor, two volumes,
1877). There is Lord Warkworth's Armenian host who suffers
in his home near Erzerum the threat of a beating from a
Turkish officer intent on interfering with his lovely daughter;
there is his Armenian priest with his flowing jet-black beard (Asiatic Turkey, 1898). There is Edward Vizetelly's Armenian
peasant helping the writer to a bag of wild duck on a bitter
moonlit night by a stream near Erzurum; and his tall, gaunt
Armenian, the landlord of a drinking den in the border town
of Kars, wearing baggy breeches, bolero jacket, and a threadbare
fez selling Bain-Bruel Cognac which, with its spread
eagle label, has suffered a fortnight's journey on the back of
pony or camel to reach the throats of his motley clientele (The
Reminiscences of a Bashi-Bazouk, 1897). Then there is the
Reverend Joseph Wolff's Armenian pipe maker's son whoputs him up in a town of two hundred Armenians and two
hundred Muslims and bemoans the fact that the town's Armenian
schoolmaster has just packed his bags, leaving them with
a school but nobody to teach in it (Mission to Bokhara, 1846).
All Armenians, peppered with the tellingly ordinary details
of real life that combine to condemn. For now there were only
the Armenian enclaves near the Syrian border and in Istanbul
where I had found Garbis Bey and his daughters making a last
few fezzes in a sweat shop, and an Armenian church on an
island in blossom leading me once more to ask: where, then?
The boatman had made a fire from twigs by the water's
edge and was brewing tea as we returned. His skivvy was
offering up prayers to Allah in the shadow of the church. As
we sat, Sadi told me his own story of Akdamar; the forbidden
love of a beautiful girl called Tamara and a young swain whose
efforts to reach her on the island were thwarted by those who
stand in the way of high passion. It all came of course to an
unhappy conclusion, the young man drowning from his efforts
and sighing, 'Ah, Tamara,' as he disappeared under the waves,
his last utterances supplying the island with its name. Even
after his slow nod in the ruins of the church, Sadi evidently
preferred his history thus.
They gave me a lift back in the red pick-up as night fell.
Mustafa was trying out medallions of English on me, words
and slogans such as his firm favourite, Camel Trophy Rally,
with which to adorn his conversation. Sadi was murmuring
'Ah . . . Tamara,' and patting me between the shoulders.
Every so often, Ismail would point out a new stand of
streetlights and claim them as his own. In this way, I came to
discover that Ismail was a lighting contractor. 'Mine,' he
would say, 'mine, mine, mine . . .' of each and every streetlight
standing proud and bright above the illuminated pools of
road and pavement. On the outskirts of town he stopped to
buy a bunch of white daffodils from a young boy at the
roadside.
'For your wife,' I said. 'Your own Tamara. How nice.''For my wife?' exclaimed Ismail, laughing. 'For my office.'
Van looked unfinished despite Ismail's efforts. Lines of
new buildings, incomplete shells through which you could see
in one window and out of the other, rose on the outskirts of
town. Ismail looked out, measuring distances and making
estimates in his quest for new contracts. Concrete kerbstones
were settling down with a sigh, as if drawn to the dirt they
were supposed to combat. Newness did not survive long in
Van. Scavenging packs of shabbiness hunted it down wherever
it might be found, and finished it off in days.
When they picked me up that evening, an excellent mood
prevailed. Mustafa's chest felt so good that he would be able
to smoke continuously, all evening. Sadi had put the Selcuk
church out of his mind, and Ismail was looking forward to a
second-storey evening, with unrivalled views of his own
illuminations, at Van's best restaurant.
The town's best restaurant was situated above the petrol
station, but that incongruity only emphasized the sheer big
city style of the place. There was damask and ranks of cut
glass. There were ice buckets and a man in dinner jacket seated
deferentially behind an electric organ. There were beautifully
interleaved menus, soft lighting, scrolls of butter, tomatoes
sculpted to resemble roses, and vases of flowers. A posse of
neatly waistcoated young men showed us to a table in the
window. I understood how I should perceive the place; as a
mid-town Akdamar, another rather more conveniently located
place where Van's rich might forget.
As Ismail sneaked a fatherly peek at his streetlights through
the windows, I saw mud-splattered lorries filling up on the
forecourt. We drank to each other, to streetlights and to the
bemused lorry drivers catching sight of our raised glasses as
they pulled out into the night.
'You'll join us for a picnic tomorrow,' Ismail asked as
salads, stuffed peppers, aubergine dishes, and plates of rice
winged in from the outstretched arms of bestarched, meticulous
waiters.'I'd love to,' I replied, 'but I'm going to Hakkari.'
Going to Hakkari? They had not heard so strange a thing,
they all agreed, in months.
'No,' said Ismail. He was not forbidding me, just telling
me that I was wrong. I explained that I understood the drive
to Hakkari four hours south of Van to be extremely beautiful.
'Sure it is, but Hakkari is disgusting,' complained Ismail,
it will be like a pleasant walk to arrive at a toilet.'
Ismail's cousin joined us and was asked for his view on
Hakkari. 'I go there every month to sell sports shoes,' he said,
and his tone told me that I could take it from him. But Ismail's
cousin had no chance to push the point for he shortly froze,
ducked, and turned to the others. 'My father is here,' he
hissed, surveying the room for surreptitious escape routes
from a crouched position just above the stuffed peppers. It was
apparently a grave social offence to drink in front of one's
father, the aged, balding gentleman posted at the far end of the
room.
'I thought your old man's eyesight was going,' said Ismail.
'But you know how word gets round,' replied his cousin.
'Well, there goes his Saturday night,' said Ismail as his
cousin disappeared discreetly down the back stairs. 'To
fathers,' he announced, 'distant or dead,' and did the cousinly
thing by making sure the missing man's quota of raki did not
go undrunk.
We probably drank for everybody's cousins that night.
'Shameful,' said Ismail, swaying slightly in his seat.
'Shameful drinking, shameful looking at other women, shameful
...' he hiccupped, 'going to Hakkari.' When I aimed a
bread roll at Ismail, Sadi stayed my arm and appeared
offended. 'Bread is sacred,' he admonished me. 'Bread, the
Turkish flag, and Mohammed.'
The trouble started while I was in the lavatory fending off
the seductive advances of oblivion. By the time I got back,
fortified by a douching of cold water, everybody was on their
feet. It transpired that Ismail had provoked somebody atanother table, and offence had been taken. Henchmen were
gathered round the two antagonists as they circled each other,
calming them down, interposing themselves where necessary,
trying to make them see sense. But in this bristlingly aggressive
war dance rival parties brushed against each other and the
potential flashpoints started to multiply. Like the plane over
Akdamar and the Selcuk church, reality had barged its
unseemly way through the doors of Van's best restaurant. A
whirling dance of insulted manhood worked its way down the
stairs, rolling up shirt sleeves as it went. Worried Mustafa was
rubbing his chest with great circular movements. 'One word,'
he told me resignedly, 'and this.'
When the altercation spilled on to the garage forecourt, it
promptly turned into a fight. The stifling manners of the
restaurant, the ties, suits, and polite conversation it demanded,
had clearly frustrated the menfolk of this frontier town. Now
all pretence was abandoned, and getting into a fight on the
forecourt of the petrol station was like coming home. Exhilaration
was abroad. Men in flapping jackets and with ties
draped over tight bellies were throwing fists at each other
while friends and employees were attempting to bundle them
into waiting cars. A man, face black with anger, swerved past
me as he ran to thump another man, and apologized to the
foreigner as he did so.
Then they were shepherding us upstairs again; it was
adjudged that those in Ismail's party should consider themselves
in danger, and take refuge in the restaurant until further
notice. Tantalized, I asked Mustafa what that single word of
insult had been, but he held up his hand as if to halt the traffic
of my questions. So we sat as if in a bunker and smoked more
cigarettes while a waiter supplied regular updates from the
window. One man who had been hit in the stomach, he
reported, was lying in a drunken stupor on the forecourt. A
late-night petrol customer was standing over him, scratching
his head. As things were, he could not position his car for
petrol without running him over. Several cars had beencircling, presumed to be waiting for Ismail. As we waited, a
series of phone calls were made in which the unconditional
withdrawal of the insult was negotiated. In what I took to be
a moment of high tension, Mustafa caught my eye.
'You like George Michael?' he asked me.
Ismail had fallen asleep and was in no position to retract
the insult. Eventually, exploratory phone calls made from the
restaurant on Ismail's behalf went unanswered. Then it was
noticed that reports from the window had dried up. The waiter
there had also fallen asleep. The view from the window was
of an unthreatening, sleepy town. Supporting Ismail between
us, we carried him downstairs and dumped him unceremoniously
into the back of the pick-up. As we sped off into the
night, streetlights probed at Ismail's retinas and above the
accelerating engine I heard his prostrate form mumble 'mine'.
Once more, I asked what had happened.
'Ismail called that man a pimp,' Sadi replied. 'I think he
meant it as a joke. But there are people in this town who don't
like Ismail.' Perhaps that was inevitable; illuminating the inky
shadows where Van's hard men had always done their business
undisturbed was never likely to win him friends.
We raced round a corner and came to a halt outside my
hotel in a squeal of tyres. In the confusion, somebody had sat
on those daffodils destined never to adorn Ismail's office; the
sickly scent inside the pick-up was overbearing.
'Go straight inside and stay inside,' somebody told me
urgently as if my life depended on it before kissing me on both
cheeks. Never before had life felt so deliriously like a gangster
movie. Next morning's bruises suggested I attempted an
impulsive forward roll through the hotel door as if to avoid
the inevitable gunfire.
I staggered upstairs, locked my bedroom door, and fell on
to the bed. At the window, tyres skidded through the night.chapter eighteen




I awoke to a sensation that suggested I had ignored the
regulations in a hard hat area to my cost. As I made for the
bathroom, daylight at the window probed indelicately at the
frayed nerve ends around my eyes, like protruding wires in
the rubble of my personal demolition. As I bent to slake my
thirst, the bathroom's cold tap coughed at me emptily.
How bad had it been? Did calling somebody a pimp invite
a protracted vendetta in Van? Had Ismail's party gone into
hiding until, by a series of negotiated settlements and concessions,
honour was satisfied and one's safety was once again
guaranteed on the streets? Should I await a cryptic message?
Was it safe to leave? Or would I meet a besuited heavy on the
stairs who, recognizing me as one of Ismail's boys, would
puncture my solar plexus with a single well-aimed blow and
whisper in my ear the Turkish equivalent of 'Compliments of
the Captain'?
After the high melodrama of the previous evening, it was
hard to accept that every offended party was most likely
marinating in a raki-sweat sleep and incapable of remembering
the insult, let alone avenging it. Instead, it was easier to
remember that the English word 'horde' comes from the
Turkish word 'ordu' meaning 'army', and to believe that I
now knew why. Since I might not safely linger in Van, I
tiptoed down the empty stairs, paid my bill, and fled to the
bus station for the morning service to Hakkari.
Hakkari was not the most obvious place to flee to. Sanctuary
has doubtless been sought more sensibly elsewhere. Hakkari
was the Kurdish town at the end of the road, with areputation as an unlovely, desolate, and dangerous place. But
even in my raki-thumping unease, I could not help thinking of
a river called the Zab, even known sometimes as the Great
Zab, and it wasn't every day a river was called that. When
such a river flows south to a town called Hakkari, what can
you do but follow it, notwithstanding the claim of your host
from the previous evening that it debouches into a toilet?
Moreover, it had been the intriguing habit of travellers,
particularly those of the nineteenth century, to refer to 'the Hakkari', a strategic deployment of the definite article that
conferred on the area an unlikely distinction comparable to the
Punjab or the Serengeti. Colonial familiarity, in such cases,
had probably prompted the definite article. But Hakkari was
different; neither colonial nor familiar, I guessed its use derived
from a desire to lay boastful claim to a comparable kinship
with these remote and inaccessible mountains, the subtlest
kind of adventurer's name dropping that bespeaks intrepidity,
in a place devoid of colonial cricket pitches or safari camps that
had awed these travellers deep in south-east Turkey. (Or
Kurdistan.)
No lesson had been more firmly impressed upon me than
that the label 'Kurdistan' should only be attempted by those
fully trained in the use of highly volatile and inflammatory
linguistics.
'Kurdistan?' Istanbul Turks had bridled as I'd recounted
my itinerary months earlier. 'You mean south-east Turkey.'
I honestly thought I'd meant Kurdistan, if only for the
reason that there had been a time when kurdistan was writ
large and ingenuous across these mountains on even the most
official maps of an empire stretching from the Balkans to
Baghdad. A time of nineteenth-century travel accounts such as
Comte de Cholet's Armenie, Kurdistan, Mesopotamia, Ely B.
Soane's To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise; and A. M.
Hamilton's Road to Kurdistan.
But now 'Kurdistan' had been Palestinized, stripped of its
old traveller's poetry. To use it risked the ire of many Turks,who presumed offensive separatist sympathies. The cartographers
who once laid out its letters in Ottoman map rooms
now wrote anadolu (Anatolia) and turkiye (Turkey), as if to
mark the territory as an inalienable Turkish birthright. The
old names that once identified the various territories of eastern
Turkey had meanwhile been deported. Armenia and Georgia
were expelled east to the post-Soviet republics while Kurdistan
went south to Iraq where, in spite of Saddam's inhuman
savagery, the area was still known as such; Iraqi Kurdistan but
Kurdistan nevertheless.
Relieved, I watched the outskirts of Van fall away behind
us. The busboy eventually me brought me a bottle of much
needed water. Rows of veiled heads turned at my frantic,
unchecked gurgling.
'The heat,' I explained, thinking that a raki hangover would
not wash in this company. I pointed at where the sky would
have been if the roof of the bus had not got there first. But the
veiled women only looked at me blankly, for it was not very
hot. In fact, when I looked towards the window and the
treeless heights beyond, a light tracery of dismissive drizzle
was falling against the glass.
I took refuge in my own map, where the final letters of turkiye and anadolu combined to form a pincer movement
deep into the region. Lest anyone forget, was their message,
but they also made the map hard to read, as if to suggest that
outsiders anyway had no business here. It was, however, clear
that bar an impossible track through border country to the
south this was the only road into Hakkari. The mountains
crawling gradually up the window-panes either side of me
threw a shadow across the map to reinforce the message that
the Hakkari region was remote indeed.
Such were the winter snowfalls here that villages regularly
disappeared. The remains of fifty or sixty villagers might
eventually be found strewn across a mountainside amid their
broken homes and possessions long after the thaw had exposed
them to the vultures, eagles, and wolves. Distances were long,winters were hard, and gradients were steep; in such a place
the outside world existed beyond the neighbouring villages
only as a vaguely heard rumour, and latterly as a strange
entertainment of little relevance that reached them via their
few television screens. The Kurdish fealties had always been to
the village and to the valley. Trouble came from neighbouring
villages short on grain or perhaps wives, from villages whose
distinct dialects identified them as outsiders who were not to
be trusted.
The Ottoman authorities in Constantinople and the feudal
fiefdoms of Kurdistan had long enjoyed an untroubled working
relationship. The Ottomans, cautious of aggravating what
they saw as a strategic buffer against the Persian shahs to the
east, largely left the Kurdish barons alone. For their part, they
were happy to accept the notional authority of the Ottomans,
largely paying the requisite lip-service as if by subscription.
As the Ottoman Empire strained at the seams in the late
nineteenth century, however, so demands on the local barons
to supply Kurdish manpower for the Sultan's wars against
Tsarist Russia increased. But it was the emergence of the
avowedly Turkish ideology in the early twentieth century that
finally did for relations between Constantinople and Kurdistan.
The Turks started priding themselves on their Turkishness,
and took to calling their country Turkey. At this point,
unsurprisingly, the neighbouring Kurdish villages started to
view each other in a more favourable light. After all, they
were all Kurds in a place called Kurdistan. Only since an
aggressive notion of alien nationhood had started to lay claim
to a geography and culture which had always been their own,
did it seem to matter. And in that overlap lay seeds of trouble
which have been germinating ever since.
In March 1993, a few weeks before my arrival in Van, the
Kurdish guerrillas had declared a ceasefire. Perhaps no hatchets
had been buried, but they had at least been laid down. Once
reports suggested that the former war zone was now swarmingwith journalists, trades unionists, and even Finnish MPs, I
guessed it was safe enough even for me.
Not far after the village of Headcastle (main feature: a castle
at the head of the hill), the road for Iran turned off at New
Bridge (newish bridge across the Zab). These names were
unimaginative, but throughout my journey they had served
me well; my habit of translating them wherever possible
rendered them comfortingly familiar. But beyond New
Bridge, I was on my own. Next stop was Hakkari, with that
exceptional circumflex sitting astride the second 'a' like a
phonetic border post to make it read something like Hakkqyari. I could hardly pronounce the place, let alone guess how it
translated.
At the first roadblock, a small soldier in green fatigues
clambered from a chair outside his army post and shouldered
his way down the aisle. He did the endearing thing of craning
his head to different angles so that he might compare identification
photos held up for his examination with the real thing.
If you concentrated solely on his head and neck, you could
convincingly make him resemble an inquisitive chicken. Thus
does time pass on Turkish buses.
'England?' he asked of my passport.
'England,' I replied.
'Not Ireland?' he asked, narrowing his eyes. 'Bad people.'
'Good footballers,' I replied in an attempt to placate him.
'But terrorists.'
'Not all of them,' I said. 'And not on the road to Hakkari.'
He nodded in understanding, said, 'London,' convincingly
mimicked the noise of an exploding bomb, and returned my
passport.
The road which had previously commanded broad views
was now being funnelled into a gorge alongside a boiling river
that leapt with a white-capped, melt-swollen fury. Every so
often, the bus swerved to avoid neatly indented teethmarks in
the tarmac where several yards of road surface had been sweptaway by the current to disappear among the rapids in a brown
tide of uprooted saplings and hummocks. In slow time, it
might have looked like a lava flow.
The sight was enough to coax from my recuperating brain
a story that Sadi had told me the previous evening. At a nearby
river crossing some thirty years ago, a wedding party in a
lorry had left the road and disappeared into the spring current.
There were no survivors. Since then, the locals had called the
place Satan's Bridge.
'They never found the bodies?' I asked.
'They never found the truck,' replied Sadi.
His story-telling was improving. As I looked from the bus
window at the landscape, I sensed all the anger contained
within its contours. It was as if it had infected the people who
lived among these mountains, along the valley of this river.
During the Great War, however, Turks and Kurds had cooperated
enthusiastically in the annihilation of their archenemies,
the infidel Armenians. A few years later, they dealt
similarly with the Greek invaders, but the Kurds soon discovered
that that final conflict was to be known as the Turkish War of Independence, and that no such co-operation would
take place in the formation of a state called neither Kurkey nor Turdistan, but Turkey. Soon after, the new Turkish republic
refused to recognize the existence of a language called Kurdish.
Kurdish village names were banned. The Kurds were widely
referred to as 'Mountain Turks'.
Why should it surprise me then that my Istanbul friends
should not recognize a place called Kurdistan?
Kurdish grievances had finally come to a head in early
1925, six months before Atattirk would announce the abolition
of the fez. A series of uprisings in February led to five thousand
Kurdish insurgents laying siege to Diyarbakir, the regional
capital. The local gendarmerie sent to quell the trouble threw
in their lot with the rebels. In March, some Kurds actually
infiltrated the city, such was their commitment to the cause,by means of the sewers, but were eventually repelled by
Turkish cavalry regiments and by machine-gun fire.
With the dispatch to the area of eight infantry divisions,
however, the government position was soon consolidated. As
Turkish troops massed, the general staff requested a list of the
towns and villages which had declared their fidelity to the
republic. 'In order to have the fullest possible information
before operations begin,' a report in the London Times interpreted
the sinister request. Lack of national sentiment was no
longer an option. If you were not prepared to declare as
Turkish, then you were not on the list; you were Kurdish with
all the attendant hazards implied.
When the government offensive came, the rebels were
routed. In mid-April, the rebellion's leader, Sheikh Said, was
captured; five months later, he and fifty-two of his followers
were hanged in Diyarbakir. Another four hundred were
hanged in Elazig to the north; rebel villages were burnt and
their defiant peasants massacred. What had collided with the
bold, bright idealism of the new republic?
On February 25, a Times leader writer had claimed that
Kurds customarily lived on a high-calorie diet of killing: 'As
the Kurds have no longer Armenians to kill, they have taken
to killing Turks instead.' But even the Turks did not dare take
such a line, claiming instead that religion was at the heart of
the problem. They figured that the foreign powers might find
much to excuse in the strong arm heroism of a young republic
struggling to throw off the restraining shackles of reaction.
Certainly, there was a significant element of religious
grievance behind the Kurdish revolt. At its head was a religious
figure. The insurgents made repeated calls for the restitution
of the caliphate. Officers and mandarins loyal to the old regime
provided clandestine support to the uprising. And there was
talk of jihad, a holy war against the infidel secularists in Ankara,
who had abolished the caliphate only the previous year. The
religious grievance was raw.But there was another cause for Kurdish anger. What the '
Turkish press and the authorities did not much publicize was the
fact that on the very day of the caliphate's abolition, 3 March
1924, all Kurdish schools, associations, and publications were
also banned by decree. Was March 3 1924 just a busy day in \
the Turkish parliament or did the simultaneous abolition of
the caliphate provide a convenient smokescreen behind which
oppressive anti-Kurdish legislation might be passed? Was the
problem Kurdish nationalism as much as religious reaction?
The rebels did not only demand a caliph-king, but a king
of Kurdistan. Suggestions that the rebels were nationalists
rather than Koran-thumpers drew a tellingly hysterical
response from elements within the Turkish establishment.
'The rude, savage, and ignorant mountaineers of Kurdistan,' [ (my italics) one journalist wrote, 'are too uncivilized to have
any possible notion about a national movement.' Beneath the
journalist's invective a deep fear of Kurdish nationalism could
be detected. Turkish nationalism underpinned the very legitimacy
of the new republic's existence; it was the ideal by which
the national entity was defined. Kurdish nationalism, however,
with its large geographical overlap, was similarly the ideal by
which the Turkish national entity was undermined. Kurdish
nationalism called into question Turkey itself. But it was
happening, the clear articulation of Kurdish nationalist aspirations,
and the authorities were alarmed.
Perhaps it is because of this that other journalists have done
a good deal of prison time for arguing the Kurdish case;
perhaps this is why a travel guide which claimed there were '
Kurds in Turkey and a German magazine which included
within its covers a map of Kurdistan were banned as recently
as 1989; why some eight staff working for the pro-Kurdish
publication Ozgiir Giindem (Free Agenda) died in mysterious ;
circumstances during 1993, most recently a young correspondent,
Ferhat Tepe, whose bruised body was found by a
fisherman in a lake near Elazig on August 5 of that year.
Cliffs reared up on either side of the bus, blocking out thelight. By the roadside lay mottled blocks of ice, glaciers the
size of houses. Local men, rifles slung across their shoulders,
had erected bivouacs from plastic sheeting and were coaxing
fires into life for making tea. They were members of the
village militias, paid by the government to carry government
arms. In this, the poorest of Turkey's provinces, the men had
no choice but to be in the pay of the government, if pay really
meant pay, even if the affiliation branded them as traitors to
the Kurdish cause and made them and their families prime
targets for separatist attack. Every man has his price, and these
beleaguered villagers were highly affordable.
The years since 1984 had seen a bloody litany of insurgent
attacks on police posts and pro-government villages, the
lynching of government sympathizers and Turkish teachers,
and the torching of schools. They had also seen army reprisal
attacks on PKK strongholds and on public demonstrations,
and the gunning down of pro-Kurdish journalists. Since 1984,
at least eight thousand civilians, insurgents, and soldiers had
died.
An early October day in 1992 had accounted for some forty
of them, all villagers, who had been attacked by one hundred
guerrillas at a place called Walnut Mountain. I remembered the
words of a witness to the aftermath, a young Turkish soldier I
had met in Cappadocia the previous winter where he was on
leave.
'It was still quite warm,' he told me. 'A beautiful time of
year. I think they must have been approaching the end of the
harvest. I remember noticing dust from the threshing in the
air long before we arrived. That, and smoke at a distance.
We'd been informed of the attack. And as we approached, you
could smell the place, the oddest smell. We found most of the
bodies within yards of the village square, and a few others
elsewhere. From where and how they lay, you could see which
of them had tried to run. You could tell who had had the
quickest legs.'
Survivors told the soldier that the PKK had turned up andpersuaded the village's fifteen militiamen to lay down their
arms so that they might more congenially talk to the villagers
- Kurds to Kurds - in what passed as the village square. One
of the insurgents gave a speech glorifying the PKK, and then
they opened fire - Kurds on Kurds - without warning before
torching a number of the houses.
Afterwards, the soldiers did what they could to help tidy
up. A few of them offered cigarettes to the male survivors.
Around them, burnt-out ruins smoked in the autumn air. The
agonized keening of the women sounded over the corpses. In
the middle of fields where the stubble stood starched and dry,
secretaries from the judiciary sat at desks in front of typewriters,
filling out reports. In front of one house, the washing
was still out, and a white shirt was soiled by smuts. Machine
gunned oxen had fallen where they stood, in the yokes that
attached them to their threshing sleds, the same sleds I had
seen in Soapmakers and in Pomegranate; I could picture the
beautiful flint patterns, embedded diagonally across the underside
of the bases, but smeared in this case with the blood and
the viscera of murdered cattle.
It was meant to be a lesson, this massacre of Kurds by
Kurds, to discourage others from accepting government arms.
Village attacks of this sort happened with sickening regularity.
Every Kurdish village was a potential Walnut Mountain.
Forced to declare either for the PKK or the government, the
villagers were prey to the faction they were seen to have
rejected, and dependent on the protection of those who did
not generally turn up in time.
At another road block, a soldier flipped through the pages
of my passport, murmuring the names of distant Turkish
resorts where he rather expected me to be.
'Kusadasi, Istanbul, Antalya, Pomegranate . . .?' I merely
shrugged, for the question was good.
And it became better as the bus meandered into Hakkari,
which I now learned best translated as building site. If you
looked up, the shabby unfinished breeze-block walls with theirobscene lips of long-dried cement protruding between the
blocks like petrified waves gave way to sublime snow-covered
massifs, reflecting light and sunshine like enormous mirrors.
All that airy beauty only exacerbated the situation at ground
level, where there was a strong sense of permanence about
Hakkari's unfinished state. On the second floor of a building
where work had long stopped, only an ageing sofa in yellow
chintz suggested that the foreman occasionally stopped by comfort
guaranteed - to supervise this stupefying lack of
progress. It was as if the breeze-blocks and the aggregate, and
the bags of cement piled in the shadows of such building
shells, had become entrenched features of the landscape. If you
looked closely, you could see that those piles of aggregate had
settled down, become mossy over the years. The building
materials represented an excuse that lasted for ever, the one
that claimed the entire population of Hakkari had only just
moved in.
In the town square, Atattirk was mounted on horseback.
Perhaps it was supposed to endear him to the Kurds on
account of their fabled love of horses; more practically perhaps,
it gave him the height he needed to ride with dignity the
regular desecrations that were visited upon him, or maybe it
simply allowed him to get away more rapidly. Whatever, the
mount was rearing on her hind legs as if Hakkari was a
diamond-headed snake coiled at her feet.
I walked past the town's market, a series of tattered
bivouacs spilling along the main street which in their appearance
served notice of the shiny ghetto blasters, plastic trinkets,
training shoes, and cigarette cartons on sale there. Nothing
was made any longer in Hakkari, not the kilims, the carpets,
nor the saddle bags I had seen in the market towns elsewhere;
nothing made but small fortunes servicing illicit consumer
markets across Turkey's unguarded mountain borders with
Iran and Iraq.
I noticed the intriguing word 'Turizm' and an attendant
arrow had been scrawled in blue paint on a wall. Even withoutthe aggrandizing 'office' or 'bureau', the message proved an
economy with the truth; the arrow led me to a small room
behind the bus company offices where a man entangled in
lengths of blue twine was trying to tame a large cardboard box
which had about it the suspicious look boxes have when they
are destined for an unmanned border. I asked the man for a
tourist brochure. He disappeared into a corner and returned
with one that was dog-eared and creased. As 1 read, I soon
became aware that I was in the presence of an awesome civic
optimism. 'Hakkari has important skiing possibilities,' ran the
caption in English below a photo of the overhanging massif
This was to be translated to mean that although skiing was not
currently possible - there was not a piste, not a ski-lift, not a
pair of skis in or near Hakkari - it did at least have snow
covered mountains. In the mean time, although the brochure
did not say so, you were advised not to walk out of town for
fear of being kidnapped or made to suffer a more permanent
disappearance.
The town's second attraction as featured in the brochure
had been given the heading 'Stock Farming in Hakkari'. A
motley and somewhat unfocused flock of goats was ranged
across a yard. Dude ranching it was not. The third photograph,
which acted as a promotional summary, had been taken from
the lower slopes of the mountain by a photographer who had
evidently chanced his life for the sake of his craft on a foray
out of town. 'A General of Hakkari,' the caption read.
Thinking to consider my recreational options over a cup of
tea, I turned, waving the brochure in thanks as I left. But the
Kurd looked up from his box in outraged astonishment.
'Where are you going?' he gestured angrily.
'For a tea,' I replied equably.
'Not with the brochure, you aren't,' he told me. 'You
know where it is if you want another look.'
So I left the town's one brochure and took refuge in Hakkari's one cafe, where the town's few, somewhat bluntened,
young blades had gathered to smoke cigarettes. Theroom was dominated by a fountain, a large basin with a series
of trickle-down rims below a fruit bowl full of apples, bananas,
and oranges - made entirely of fibreglass. Somewhere inside
the contraption a lightbulb glowed, giving the whole thing an
eerie nacreous look as if it were alive. I skirted the edge of it
uncertainly and sat down in a corner. When I looked up, I
noticed that everybody was looking at me with an utter lack
of expression which I took to be measured malevolence. I
checked my fly. I ran the back of my hand across my nose.
And still they stared. Where, I wondered, were all those
observers and Finnish MPs when I sorely needed their steadying
influence? Then one of the larger young men left his chair
and walked slowly across the room towards me. I froze. When
he got within reach and stretched out a hand, I shut my eyes
and braced myself. He changed channels on the television
perched just above my head.
Near by sat an old man wreathed in cigarette smoke. In
heavily accented Turkish, he asked me where I was from.
When I told him, he drew hard on his cigarette. He'd heard of
England, he told me, heard of it on the television. But he
knew more about Germany; plenty of Hakkari men had been
to work in Germany - Dortmund, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf - but
not to England. He was too old to have worked in Germany,
but he'd once been to Diyarbakir as a young man and had
worked in Van some years back.
Van's sophistication had bewildered him. It had also made
him uncomfortable; he was always getting into trouble for
speaking Kurdish. I told him that I understood the laws had
been relaxed in 1991. He snorted. 'In 1991,' he said, 'they told
us we were free to speak our own language at home. Well,
praise to Allah, as if we had not been speaking Kurdish at
home for ever. They were only dropping a law they could not
enforce. What we cannot do is to speak our language in public
places or government offices. I worked as a waiter in Van. If
the boss ever heard me speaking Kurdish to people, even
Kurdish people, he would have sacked me.'There existed, then, a strict linguistic dress code: speaking
Turkish was like dressing for dinner, discarding the shabby
garb that was Kurdish. Woe betide anybody who turned up in
the wrong language.
The old man sighed, leaned forward, and took two cigarettes
from my packet, one destined for his mouth, the other
to lodge behind his ear. The future had never been there,
reliable and dependable, allowing him to take the next cigarette
for granted. 'Look at those young men,' he said. 'When I was
young, the army left us pretty much to ourselves. But now
they're everywhere. So what will these young boys do? I'll tell
you what; Germany, if they're lucky, or Istanbul. Of those
that remain, some of the older ones will take government
money to carry government guns. Many of the rest will join
up, because if they don't, the PKK will anonymously slip their
names to the authorities as PKK sympathizers. The treatment
they will then receive is pretty much guaranteed to turn them
into PKK activists. The authorities don't seem to realize that
they recruit for the PKK far more effectively than the PKK
does itself.' He cackled merrily. 'And anyway,' he continued,
'many of them feel that PKK membership is preferable to the
kind of treatment they can expect as Kurds during national
service. If you're going to have to spend a couple of years
getting wet and miserable in the mountains, better do it with
your own people.'
I asked him if he supported the PKK.
'Of course,' he replied, not even bothering to lower his
voice. 'Everybody around here supports the PKK.'
'In spite of what they do in the villages? In spite of Walnut
Mountain?'
'They are all we have,' he said. 'We can hardly speak our
language, we have to watch Turkish television, read Turkish
newspapers, vote for Turkish political parties. The PKK may
kill people in the mountains but they're the only voice we
have. If they allowed us a political party, then perhaps fewer
of us would care for the PKK.'you want to live in a country called Kurdistan?'
'I just want the same opportunities as the Turks. It is too
late for me, but I'd like my grandchildren to learn Kurdish at
school. That would be grand! I'd like to watch Kurdish
programmes on television. And I'd like these fucking soldiers
off our backs. For the rest, well, we might get some kind of
autonomy one day but few of us really expect to get our own
country. I mean, with neighbours like ours!' He pulled a fresh
cigarette out from behind his ear, replaced it with another
from my packet, and patted me on the knee as he did so.
He leaned forward into the flame of his match and allowed
me the opportunity to look closely at his turban. It was a
rough creation in the style I had occasionally seen elsewhere in
Turkey. In Hakkari, most of the old men wore them, a turban
with a look decidedly civilian compared to what Hakkari's
defiant young men were wearing. Among the caps and the
veils on the streets, they were distinctive in a paramilitary
uniform with romantic flourishes, khaki boiler suit open at the
front to a waist wrapped in a neat colourful cummerbund and
a turban on their heads, a tightly bound, active-service item of
headgear. It was the uniform of the PKK, but it was also a
distillation of Kurdish national costume. The Turkish security
forces regarded these young men suspiciously. Wearing the
uniform was a calculated provocation that courted arrest.
When he became bold enough to stockpile a further cigarette
behind his other ear, I returned the boldness by asking
him about fezzes.
'Fezzes?' he replied. 'Turkish. No, we never wore fezzes
here. Turbans, always turbans.'
'What happened then when the government banned them?'
'They banned them, did they?' he asked with the patience
of one who was being amply supplied with excellent Western
cigarettes. 'When was that?'
'Oh, about one hundred and sixty years ago.'
'And then they introduced fezzes in their place?'
'Yes.''So now those people think I should be wearing a fez?'
'Well, they actually banned them too.'
Hamdy Bey's 1873 photographic album of costumes supported
the old man's argument that this had never been fertile
fez territory. The nearest towns represented in the album were
Mardin and Cizre to the west, and in 1873 at least neither
featured a fez.
As I was leaving, my cigarette supply drastically depleted,
I heard the old man telling a friend across the cafe that they'd
banned turbans.
'Oh,' his friend replied. 'Why?'
'I don't know. And fezzes.'
There was a silence. 'What are fezzes?' And in that question
was the thought that in coming to Hakkari I had crossed
linguistic and sartorial borders even if I was not deemed to
have crossed a national one.
It soon became clear I had crossed a gastronomic one too.
Tussling with the limpest, greasiest kebab it had ever been my
misfortune to be drawn against, my teeth closed on an object
hard enough to make me wince. It proved to be a brass screw,
half an inch long. When I pointed it out to the waiter, he
issued no apology but a Eurekan yelp, turning triumphantly
to the chef behind the food counter. By way of explanation,
he pointed enthusiastically at the large stainless-steel.wall plate
behind the vertical kebab spit, drooping forward from the top
left-hand corner and the empty screw hole there. I think I was
expected to share in the general celebrations. When the waiter
proferred the screw, it was several seconds before I realized he
was asking me to suck it clean of kebab gravy.
Later, I walked round the town, but did so with a deliberate
purpose that masked my aimlessness. Ceasefire or no, there
was a wildness about Hakkari and not the merest hint of a
Finnish MP. The semblance of order felt wafer-thin and I did
not wish to attract attention to myself. But only when I started
noticing the same faces did I appreciate that aimless wandering
through the town was quite the done thing. Around me,everybody was doing it, the Hakkari promenade, linking arms,
fingering worry beads and patrolling for the next momentary
diversion. We all stopped for a couple of boys skirmishing in
the market, a few took notice of farm animals feeding off piles
of rubbish in a back street. We gathered to watch another
foreman supervise the removal of his sofa from one storey,
now apparently completed, to the next one down. The delivery
of a washing machine drew a considerable crowd of
promenaders, and you could have sold tickets for a good view
of the battered taxi which stopped in the main street with a
puncture.
I woke during the night to a nearby clatter, and in my
fevered imagination it sounded exactly like the sound ceasefires
make when they break, and atrocities are committed on
unfortunate tourists. In fact, the chest of drawers in my hotel
bedroom had merely collapsed. The next morning, I breathed
a sigh of relief as I clambered on board a dolmush; the van to
Van. After a last 'General of Hakkari', that sad, shabby town
disappeared among the mountains for ever.
The ceasefire would last another two weeks. Then, one
evening, over a hundred PKK guerrillas would set up several
surprise road blocks near a Kurdish town to the north called
Bingol, or A Thousand Lakes. Later, it was reckoned that the
PKK had been tipped off; among the buses they flagged down,
one was carrying unarmed soldiers to their barracks. In the
early summer evening, the Kurdish flag fluttering in the wind,
the guerrillas delivered their customary propaganda speeches
to a terrified audience, selected thirty soldiers, and marched
them down to the banks of the Memdo River. There, they
shot them all dead.
The ceasefire broke up in a welter of recriminations: the
government, it was alleged, had shamelessly exploited it so as
to consolidate its military positions in the south-east; the PKK
had only respected its own ceasefire until it was ready once
more to kill - unarmed soldiers by the banks of the Memdo
River.Soon, the murderous pattern was re-established with a
vengeance. The PKK torched schools and lynched collaborators.
Three hundred deaths occurred within a month, and
army commanders vowed the total destruction of the PKK by
the end of 1993. Then, for the first time, the PKK focused its
attentions on the tourist resorts of western Turkey. A bomb
went off outside Aya Sofya in Istanbul; another injured several
people in Kusadasi; and twenty-three people were injured in a
series of four bomb explosions in Antalya.
'Kusadasi, Istanbul, Antalya, Pomegranate.' I remembered
the soldier's disbelieving refrain. But now that they had hit three of these places, the sound was no longer of water lapping
against beaches and the hubbub of holiday bars but shattered
glass, a moment of silence and the screams of terror. Even in
these places Turkey could not escape itself.chapter nineteen




From the terminal, a long concrete breakwater that fingered
into Lake Van a few miles north of the town, I watched
the ferry lights approaching. For an hour, the throb of the
engines grew gradually louder as the ferry ratcheted her way
across the watery curvature of the Earth. Insomniac seagulls
hung around the single telephone wire above my head. 'Schedule?'
the harbour master had dismissed my earlier telephone
call query. 'The ferry doesn't have a schedule.' 'But the train that it meets does.'
'Not a very good one,' said the ferry master doubtfully. I
heard him pull hard on his cigarette. 'But it will come,' he assured me. And so would paradise, universal love, and
European union; the question was when.
'More difficult,' he replied. 'But I can make predictions.' It
was his best offer.
Until early in the twentieth century, imperial policy had
regularly been decided upon the various recommendations of
the Astrologer Royal, the Dean of the Chapter of Court
Horoscopists, and the Wizard in Ordinary to the Caliph. When
the Sultan's heavenly forecasters lost the imperial appointment
and their titular embellishments, they went private, taking
their soothsayer's advice to the streets and receiving inquisitive
clients in darkened rooms where the veils that covered their
faces also concealed the flashing electric lights draped among
their beards to reinforce the celestial impression. All life's
secrets were there, from love and longevity to revelations
pertaining to the promises of paradise. I wondered whether
this ferry master might have soothsayer's blood in him, andinherited instincts intact enough to have a confident punt at
the comparatively simple arrival time of a plain ferry. And,
when I heard him say the word 'Midnight', I was not at all
disappointed since I had half expected 'Thursday' or some such
dreadful sound to assail me.
The waiting-room lived up to its name. It was not for the
occasional irksome delay but for hard-core, uncensored waiting
of the type with which the dock workers there were
evidently intimate. They cast glazed expressions at the television
film featuring a dubbed Burt Reynolds playing in the
background. The room was heavy with cigarette smoke,
distinct layers of it so thick you could almost read the stratified
geology of the room's recent history in it to learn with a fair
degree of accuracy who had smoked what, where, and when.
The dockhands had settled into a semi-permanent debris of
backgammon boards and tea trays containing tulip glasses, red
and white plastic saucers, bowls full of sugar cubes, and spoons
of a cheap alloy type which only that day had slit open one of
my fiddling, time-consuming fingertips. From experience, the
dockhands knew that the train would come when the train was
ready, and that the ferry - for dignity's sake - would not
bother to turn up until shortly before the train did. And until
then they would drink tea.
The train came from the east, from Iran. The ferry came
from Tatvan on the western shore of the lake, and the two
met at the far end of the breakwater along which the railway
line ran. Waves slapped below the rusty bollards as the ferry
eased alongside, lining up the landside tracks with those upon
her own cargo deck and shackling them together them so that
they then ran, conjoined and unbroken, all the way to Tehran.
A few trucks and a dolmush lumbered off the deck. Foot
passengers, roustabouts grimy with sleep and a single German
tourist heading for Tehran, clambered into it. Then they
loaded the constituent parts of a reconditioned tractor engine
on to the roofrack and under the seats. The German was passed
an old newspaper to drape across his lap before being handedan object which I heard him describe, quite correctly, as 'very
oily'.
From my vantage point on the upper deck, I was aware of
a stirring in the darkness. At first, all that could be seen was a
beam of light, a hypnotic pendulum swinging above an
approaching rumbling on the tracks. By means of a torch
beam, a man at the front of the train was signalling to the
driver at the back. As the train drew near the ferry deck, the
motion of the torch slowed, the carriage slowed in response
and rolled gently on to the ferry, and was shunted forward
until the abruptly halted motion of the torch instructed it to
stop. Then the proud carriages were uncoupled, the train was
backed up, the points were changed and the process was
repeated until by and by the entire train was broken up and
installed on the ferry's adjacent sections of track. Finally, an
errant taxi squeezed into a gap between two train carriages.
It was very clever, but more pointedly, it was perverse.
Trains generally took to ferries only when they had to; this
one had forsaken vast expanses of dry land to seek out the only
navigable stretch of water for hundreds of miles. It reminded
me of that strange species of fish which has unaccountably
abandoned the water for dry land.
The answer lay in the geology. The train had taken to the
sixty miles of water because it did not much care for the land
around Van. Massive river valleys ran across the grain of the
intended railway line, making track-laying a nightmarish
prospect. Besides, it was a light-sleeping landscape, continually
rearranging its contours in a never-ending series of mudslides
and earthquakes that made no concessions to railway lines. In
the area, I had seen short stretches of an old road running
intact within a few yards of the new one. But elsewhere the
same old road had disappeared completely and one could not
trace where it had run. Indeed - such was the surrounding
landscape - one could not see where the old road could possibly have run. A German general called Von Moltke, supervising
military movements in the area, once declared with exasperationthat nothing was flat in the area except the roofs of the
inhabitants' houses. And Lake Van, Von Moltke would have
added if he had had the strain-saving mind of a railway man.
The saloon was almost empty. I set myself down among
dun brown plastic seats, cupboards stuffed full of old life
jackets, and metal fittings that had developed a green tarnish
in the salt air, and listened to the sound of the idling engine.
So windless was the night that its reverberation travelled
unspoilt from the heart of the ship, and you could almost hear
it take a stairway, round a corner, and move down a few
corridors, falling in with the step of the approaching ticket
man, audible long before he arrived. A distant door slammed,
a key turned in a lock, and a pair of feet were dragged down a
long corridor. A key ring jangled from a belt. When the ticket
man entered the saloon he lifted a single finger to indicate that
he was ready for us.
And so we followed him to the ticket office. And waited
outside while he unlocked the door, removed the wooden
board to make a window where we might be served, and
unlocked the drawer to sell each of us a ticket for five thousand
Turkish lira. The combined takings from the passengers on
board the ferry that night to Tatvan added up to just over £2.
I felt like starting a kitty, so much so that when the ticket man
opened up the snack bar, the same old wooden panels, the
same jangling keys, I leapt up to buy a packet of stale
strawberry-flavoured wafers that reminded me of school.
Only the increased reverberations through the seats on
which we stretched out indicated that we were leaving. As we
gently slipped our lines, swung to the west and kicked up a
boiling wake, the engine seemed to leave the bowels of the
ship and rise through the floors towards us. Our bodies were
set a-judder as if with the first indications of illness. The ferry
cut a swath through satin-black waters flat as death, carrying
seven passengers, a taxi, and a train. It was shortly after
midnight.
If the accuracy of the ferry master's prediction wasuncanny, then the mere seven passengers were the more so.
Where was everybody? Where were the lolling heads, the
incessant crunch of sunflower seeds, the cigarettes offered at
dawn? The luggage falling from the racks to batter us on sharp
mountain bends? The sound of a strangled tape expiring slowly
on the bus cassette player? The collection from pale-faced
passengers of bulging black plastic bags to be slung from the
speeding windows?
True, the ferry had left late at night and, compared to the
bus service to Tatvan, took its time. But it had struck me as
an inalienable Turkish truth that you could pick out of a hat brimmed
or otherwise - a destination, a mode of transport,
and a time of departure and be guaranteed a full load. Only a
bicycle ever set out on a Turkish journey with seven or less
passengers on board. Tractor trailers minding their own
business, even those that attempted to slip surreptitiously away
in the middle of the night, seemed to fill as if by magic with
passengers. Transport on the move, buses, dolmushes, even
donkeys, awoke a primeval instinct in these former nomads.
They seemed to feel in their bones the sound of a distant
revving engine, and it spoke to them, that to travel was the
thing, the destination a secondary consideration. So where on
earth was everybody?
On the earth, I suspected, with feet firmly rooted. Not on
boats, anyway, not on the night ferry to Tatvan. Perhaps,
since the lake had never played an integral part in their lives, it
was simply that so much water scared them and they had
turned away from boats. To them, it was only fearsome
scenery, this accident of volcanic activity. No rivers flowed
from it, and only the evaporation which sweated off it in the
high heat of summer counteracted the effect of the melt-fed
rivers that ran down to the lake. Its consequent saltiness, six
times that of sea water, had always meant a sparsity of fish.
The towns and the villages had kept away, holding back from
the shoreline as if uneasy at too much saline watery proximity.
But such fear was strange for a people whose every routinejourney was philosophically accepted as a near-death experience, a people who were always throwing up when the
terror and the motion on the high road bends combined, and
the roadside skies were filled with discarded black plastic bags
of flying vomit. What was it about the lake?
While awaiting the arrival of train and ferry that afternoon,
I had idled away a few last hours with the three friends. On
their last day together, they drove me down to the lakeside
close to the ruins of the old city of Van. A long pebbly beach
punctuated by scrubby plants stretched in an arc above wavelets
on the foreshore. Ismail and Mustafa were snickering
together, and remembering what they could of the fight
outside Van's best restaurant.
But Sadi looked out across the water, to the silvery peaks
of the old volcanoes and said it was the most beautiful place in
the world. Even as he did so, however, I saw him shiver. It
was not the warmest day but nor was it shivering weather. I
bent to trail my hands in the water and where the teaspoon
had nicked me my finger stung, not the sweet ache of salt
water but a sharp pain that the water's sodas, acids, chlorides,
and sulphides inflicted; Lake Van made me shiver too. In all
this great expanse, only a few hardy fish had learned to survive
its poisoning effects. It was beautiful, but it was also
malevolent.
We walked that afternoon through the ruins of Van's old
city razed by the upheavals of geology and of mankind.
Among the fallen masonry, mounds of grass-covered rubble
now, was indexed the tragedy of a place where three peoples,
three nations, overlapped and failed to find a way of living with
each other. All that stood amidst the expanse where homes
and streets once had been was the minaret of a fourteenth
century Ottoman mosque, and in that surviving monument
was Turkey's triumph over Armenia and Kurdistan.
But it was triumph at a price so terrible that it was as if the
combined tragedies of these three nations had infected the
place and turned to poison the waters of the lake. It was notonly the tragedy of Van itself, the Armenians slaughtered
where we were standing, among these very ruins, by vengeful
Turks and Kurds after the Russian withdrawal in 1917, and
not only tethered corpses clogging the rivers that ran down to
the lake, but also the tragedy of the eight thousand soldiers
and insurgents, villagers and teachers, women and children, Turks and Kurds who had died among these mountains over
the last decade, the neat bullet holes in the bodies of thirty
unarmed young soldiers lying by the banks of the Memdo
River. It was everybody's tragedy. And if you looked into
these depths, looked further than you perhaps might care, you
might see the secrets they hid: like the hundred local dissidents
sewn into sacks and thrown into the lake at the end of another
Kurdish revolt in the summer of 1930, but also in the glimpsed
hair of a drowned bride waving among the reeds, among the
bodies of a wedding party and of a marriage that was never
consummated except in the icy embrace of a poison lake,
evidence of nature itself turned malign. And what you saw,
standing by the shores of the lake, might finally make you
shiver.
I awoke to a drenched dawn. Low clouds had been torn to
shreds to soak the ferry and Tatvan's approaching wharves,
the sheds, the rusted railway lines, and the few hazels and
poplars that lined the track into town. Puddles were settling in
the potholes.
I stayed in Tatvan long enough to have breakfast in a cake
shop. They brought me small cheese-laced rolls, honey, and
tea while the remnants of the rainstorm at the window were
gradually tidied away by an emerging, methodical sun. It was
a good place for breakfast but not, it was said, for much more
than that; Tatvan had long had a reputation as the most downat-heel
of eastern Turkey's towns. Tat was not one of Ataturk's
post-Independence War honorary prefixes; whatever it actually
meant, it hurdled the language barrier with ease.
After Hakkari, however, I knew better. I enjoyed my view
from the window of the cake shop. In Tatvan, I was remindedof what I had always admired about life in Turkey. Everywhere
was evidence of lives being lived, a continuity through
the generations in the deep-worn steps where endless feet had
fallen, the dark-stained seats where succeeding generations of
local bottoms had sat, tarnished counters old with transactions,
accumulated traces of work and life, hands oily and calloused,
splintered and ingrained with dirt adding up to a kind of
honour. There was redemption in it, and until a better
redemption came along, it would have to do.
The hundred-and-thirty-mile bus journey west to Diyarbakir
took all morning. I slept most of the way, waking only
for snatched glimpses of the passing countryside, an old man
kicking at his unresponsive motorbike, soldiers gathered at a
barrack gate shaped like a rifle, complete with trigger and
bayonet which lifted skywards when a soldier leaned his belly
on the butt.
'There's danger in Diyarbakir,' Ismail's wife had told me
as she and her husband, immaculately sober and scrutinizing
the nightscape for illuminable areas of darkness, had dropped
me at the ferry terminal the previous night. 1 knew of the
shootings that plagued the area's major city.
'You should stay in after 8.30 p.m.,' she'd said. Tell that
to your husband.
But as we approached the city's outskirts, I could see that
the fabled black basalt walls no longer kept any danger at bay.
Diyarbakir had burst out of her defences and spilled over the
plain on almost every side in a succession of unplanned
suburbs, market gardens, hospitals, and cement factories until
the old city seemed like a comparatively tiny core, the original
enclosing instinct lost at the heart of an uncontrolled sprawl.
The day must have come when, despairing at the lack of
space, a pioneering inhabitant of the city first contemplated life
beyond the walls, as if time and change were finally rendering
them redundant. Who had been first to make his home beyond
their protective shadows? And more importantly, why had he
waited so long? For since every warrior clan worth its saltincluding Romans, Selcuks, the splendidly named Black Sheep
Turkomen, and the Ottomans had invaded and occupied
Diyarbakir over the years, it did not appear that the walls had
been entirely effective.
So it was with my converted caravanserai hotel, built in
the early 1500s but with impressive defences of its own that
ignored the protection provided by the city walls a mere fifty
yards away, much as one might supplement the feeble financial
fortifications of a state pension. A strong gateway and high
walls enclosed a large courtyard with rooms off on all sides.
The Selcuk sultans had revitalized the caravanserai system
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Regularly built within
a day's walk of the average camel from each other, the traveller
could rely upon a Selcuk caravanserai. Inside, he could attend
to his camel, eat, wash, pray, and sleep while the scent of
opium and the sound of song filled the air. In the late
twentieth-century version, he could watch CNN, fax, and use
the mini-bar. But until they filled the pool, he could not swim.
And since there was no plug, he could not wash his clothes in
the basin. No object as the plug is quite so objectionable to the
Turk, who regards washing in stagnant water as an offence
against cleanliness and Islam. Running water is always provided
outside mosques. Nor, however, is any object as the
plug quite so essential to the cheapskate Western traveller. So
I customized the vegetable tray from the fridge. And as I
washed my pants in a place designed for tomatoes, I thought
how strange it was, my lack of plug, while incomprehensibly
instant images and sounds were transmitted into my hotel
room from a satellite high above the earth.
I stepped outside and was hit by a blast of history. I was
within yards of the Mardin Gate, where Sheikh Said and fifty
two of his followers had been hanged in the aftermath of the
Kurdish Revolt of 1925. Not that anybody was going to
remind me. Diyarbakir's new face was represented by two
young men in suits, the directors of Mezopotamya Export and
Import Agent Ltd Co, who hijacked me as I wandered pasttheir shiny offices. Among modern word-processors and typewriters,
they installed me in a chair and laid a draft letter in
English before me. The business of Mezopotamya Export and
Import Agent Ltd Co, they explained, was to facilitate the aid
work in Iraqi Kurdistan of organizations like Medecins sans
Frontieres and Save the Children. Could I cast an eye over
their letter of introduction? 'We have set up our company to help
your all your need,' it read. 'We love your helping, postal transaction,
representation, import and export, guides, all agency kind work.
And translation.' As I put their letter straight, they demonstrated
how much they loved my helping by bringing me a cup of
tea. Feeling increasingly helpful, I pulled up a typewriter and
started to type up my improvements. But the letters on the
keyboard were in the wrong places. There was no 'x' for
'export', no 'w' for 'We'. It was a Turkish typewriter. Laughing,
they directed me across the office to an English one. But
as I typed, I mused on how it had all started and on the letter
that the offices of the Department of Alphabet Reform in
Turkey must have written to Remington Rand Inc in the
United States in late 1928:

Dear Remington Rand Bey,
Greetings,

Please forgive the use of nib and camel-hair brush.
You may be aware that our exalted leader, Mustafa
Kemal Atattirk, has introduced a new alphabet now in
mandatory use throughout our country. All citizens, from
children in the schools to their grandfathers, have been
learning the new characters for the past few months. We,
the Republic's civil servants, have sat exams in the new
alphabet.
Our new alphabet, closely modelled upon that in use in
your country and elsewhere in the Western world, replaces
the Arabic script formerly in use in these regions. Datingfrom the Ottoman period and adopted for its religious
associations, the Arabic script was not suited to the phonetic
needs of our language and has consequently delayed our
progress towards enlightenment.
Now that we have adopted the new alphabet, whose
twenty-nine characters ensure that the spelling of every
word in our language can be correctly ascertained from its
phonetic make-up, we are anxious to upgrade our office
equipment accordingly.
So that we need no longer write to persons such as you
with nib and camel-hair brush, could you please design
keyboards to suit our alphabet, a copy of which is enclosed,
and send three thousand typewriters forthwith.

On leaving the grateful management of Mezopotamya, I
walked straight into a funeral. The coffin was being borne
along at such a pace that to have called it a cortege would have
lent it a misleading sedateness. Tiring bearers were constantly
being relieved as new candidates emerged from the crowd of
mourners, leaned their shoulders under a corner, and supported
the corpse of their friend along the crowded street, past
the stalls of melons and tomatoes, to the distant cemetery.
Upon the coffin was draped a green shroud on which the
swirls of Arabic calligraphy were picked out in gold. Only
here, it seemed, at the margins of life, did the old alphabet
endure.
'I think the dead person is a teacher,' a voice mused in
English at my back. Three young boys were smiling at me. 'I
think this,' the speaker continued, 'because there are so many
young students following.' He nodded to himself, satisfied
with the theory. 'My name is Kasim. How do you do?'
Kasim clearly had long since progressed from the one-line
school of English I had encountered elsewhere in Turkey. He
and his friends trawled the streets every afternoon after lessons
at the lycee, looking for tourists on whom they might practise.They often bagged engineers and soldiers from the American
military-base near by, backpackers from Canada, France, and
Finland, and now they had caught me.
'Like a fish,' one of them said. 'Are you mind if we join
you?'
'"Do you",' I corrected him, my old teaching instincts
activated by the boys' enthusiasm. There was a flurry of
activity and grabbed notebooks as the boys went into emergency
session, identifying the mistake and prescribing the
treatment.
'What are you doing in Diyarbakir?' Kasim asked me once
linguistic order had been restored.
'What is your business here?' a friend put it. When I told
them, feverish conferring followed.
'I think,' said Kasim, 'we go to the flea-market.' Three
fourteen-year-old boys led me among old men immersed in
piles of leather jackets and shalvar, the baggy trousers popular
here and to the south. From the blank expressions our enquiries
generated, we might have been quizzing the old men about
more obscure items of ancient history, but eventually a shaky
trail emerged.
'We go back to the big street,' said Kasim.
'Main.'
'Main, yes, main.'
On the main street, we found the hat maker, seated
amongst flat caps and rolls of grey worsted and brown checks,
who eventually raised an eyebrow as if a memory had been
stirred.
'There was a man made fezzes,' he said, 'but he died two
years ago. His shop was four doors up.' Four doors up was
now a cheese shop, and any memories were submerged among
great drums of oily white goat's cheese. 'In my opinion,' said
Kasim, 'no fezzes are made in Diyarbakir any more.'
'Yes,' said one of his friends. 'They no longer make fezzes
in Diyarbakir.'
These Kurdish schoolboys were not interested in questioningthe sense of my investigations. All that mattered to them
was their pursuit of the key, called English, to a better life.
And they brought to that pursuit a single-minded devotion,
spooning up words, figures of speech, and scraps of grammar
with a ravenous appetite.
Kasim's father was a bus driver for the municipality Kasim's
word. He had six children and earned £150 a month,
and Kasim was not prepared to settle for that. But he was also
an adolescent. 'An American airman from the base recently
taught me dick,' remarked Kasim, apropos of nothing. 'But
then an English tourist told me the word was cock. Which one
is right, please?' I was rescued by the sight of a fez-wearing
ice-cream salesman who told me he had bought his fez several
years ago at what were now the cheese premises.
'It's the tradition,' Kasim explained, ice-cream sellers often
wear fezzes, but only when they are at work. Now then, dick
or cock?'
When the boys dragged their highly prized English speaker
back to school the next morning, I did not imagine the
questions could get harder.
The lycee was a modern block fronted by a basketball
hoop among the sprouting constructions of Diyarbakir's latest suburbs. On every side stood foundations made from yellow
fresh baulks of wood and shiny steel rods protruding like
straws from deep draughts of concrete. The fifty-odd pupils in
Room 2a clapped furiously on my arrival.
'Ask him questions,' said the teacher, setting them free.
They rose to their feet in great clamorous waves, like heroes
climbing from the trenches, arms flailing to catch my attention,
asking their questions, absorbing the answers, thanking me for
them, and sitting down again. But even as they sat, there were
always more fresh questions to replace those I had repelled
with my answers.
'What do you think of Turkey?', 'Are you interesting in
fashion?', or 'Do you like dance Michael Jackson?' I could
handle. And even if they laughed, I could tell them that myfavourite football teams were the Destroyer of Christians
Pistachio and the long-relegated whirlers of Konya. I was just
beginning to feel in control of the situation when an earnest
young girl with her hair in bunches penetrated my defences
and overwhelmed me.
'Are you working class, middle class, or upper class?' she
asked. I wanted to tell her it was an impossibly candid question
to ask of an Englishman.
'And are you wearing knickers?' I might have replied.
Instead, 1 embarked on a long explanation that was designed
primarily to deflect the question. That, if they wanted to learn
English they should perhaps know something about English
customs, and it was not the practice in England to refer to
one's class in public. In fact, whatever one's thoughts, one was
publicly dismissive of the whole class notion.
The girl in the bunches waited patiently until I had finished.
'So,' she said entirely undiverted, 'what are you?' And I took
shameful refuge in the forest of straining hands that surrounded
her.
The other difficulty arose when a young boy, who had
been quiet for much of the lesson, asked whether I was hell. I
could see that he had drawn on finite reserves of courage to
participate, and as a former teacher I knew how desperately he
needed encouragement. But until Kasim explained that an
American serviceman had visited the school a few weeks earlier
and used little but variations on this confusing expression, I
did not even know what the boy meant.
By the time the class had finished, I felt inspired by the
enthusiasm and motivation of these children. It seemed to lift
the city up, up above the resignation of the taxi-drivers who
no longer bothered avoiding the potholes on the roads and did
not care that their mayor spent all his time by the distant banks
of the Bosphorus. The example of these children liberated the
city from the cares of its people who no longer troubled
themselves to complain about harassment from the security
forces deliberately selected from western Turks, but justbowed their heads to the cuff of the palm. Even Kasim's
thwarted future plans, heartbreakingly recounted, could not
break the spirit that the children embodied. 'I wanted to be a
pilot,' he told me as he and his friends accompanied me back
to my hotel after class, 'until I discovered that Kurds did not
become pilots.'
When the boys wished me well and turned to go, I asked
them whether there was anything they needed, an English
dictionary perhaps.
'We have English dictionaries,' Kasim replied. 'What I
want is an English typewriter.' Pilotry or no, Kasim would
fly.
For while his forebears had tentatively learned the alphabet
of the foreigner, Kasim was set on learning his language. July
30 1929, when a freighter of the Fabre Line left New York
docks bound for Constantinople, was the day that could be
traced triumphantly to Kasim. In the freighter's hold was a
consignment of boxes on which the words Remington Rand
Inc were stencilled, containing Turkey's first three thousand
typewriters. The freighter passed through the Straits of Gibraltar,
skirted the North African coast past Algiers whence
Aimee, the French Sultana, had once set sail, and past Tunis
where a Grand Admiral had once found fezzes to delight his
Ottoman Sultan. And so, weeks later, the latest innovation
from the West was unloaded at the docks in Constantinople.
In spite of all the obstructions and humiliations that would
confront him, Kasim was set on improving himself. This was
the better kind of redemption I had been waiting for, and in
Kasim's example, I realized that some good things came by
water. Perhaps the Turks need not be scared of boats.chapter twenty




On the road to Adiyaman, before we were beyond the
outskirts of Diyarbakir, I found myself checking the age of my
road map. It was four years old. Never before had I checked
its age; never before had I felt the need to. I had always felt it
safe to assume that Turkey's roads, which had linked Asia
Minor's ancient cities since time began, were always going to
be there. What was a negligible four years against the venerable
lineage of these thoroughfares?
This complacent presumption had first come under fire
only ten minutes earlier when the ticket man at Diyarbakir bus
station had described a route to Adiyaman that seemed
unnecessarily long.
'The bus goes south,' he explained beneath eyebrows where
entire colonies of Anatolian insect species as yet undiscovered
might have hidden. 'South almost as far as Glorious Urfa and
then north and west on the new road to Adiyaman.'
A new Turkish road? What was this strange thing?
'But that's much longer,' I insisted, shoving my map, aged
four, beneath his nose. 'Why not take this road, Road 59,
direct to Adiyaman?'
He pushed at his glasses until they disappeared beneath his
eyebrows and replied, 'Because that road is no good any
more.'
But never before had that deterred Turkish drivers. Most
eastern Turkish roads were permanently 'no good', it came
with the territory but they were usable nevertheless. Roads
deteriorated but their deterioration was generally gradual so
that local drivers, already experts in the evasion of potholes,had plenty of time to adapt to the contours as they developed and to warn each other between shifts when sections of road
retired from service without warning.
'By no good,' 1 enquired, 'do you actually mean potholed?'
The driver tossed back his head, raised his eyebrows, and
clicked his tongue in the emphatic Turkish negative.
'A landslip?' I pressed him, but neither was that the
problem. 'Or is it simply,' I asked him, my finger snaking out
as if to prod him, 'that your drivers prefer the new road even
though it causes delay to their passengers?' For perhaps that
was it; the irresistible temptations of virgin tarmac. The ticket
seller wearily pushed me a glass of tea and offered me a
cigarette. There was something ominous in the magnanimity
of all this that should have prepared me.
'Your Road 59,' he eventually said, 'is not potholed. Nor
do the drivers take to the new road by choice. Road 59 is
under water. And will remain so.'
The road, it transpired, had recently been submerged along
with a number of villages under the rising waters of the
Euphrates as it backed up behind a great dam, the centrepiece
of the Southern Anatolia Project. The dam was expected to
potentialize an enormous irrigation project in the parched
border country to the south-east, to generate massive amounts
of hydro-electric power, and to bring employment to the
area's separatist malcontents. 'So if you still want your road
back,' said the ticket seller, 'go argue it with the Atattirk
Dam.'
I fingered my map fondly. This was change so rapid that I
was being asked to replace it before its time, before the
accumulated holes, rips, and stains of any map worth its salt
signalled that retirement had finally been earned. Vast tracts of
land that had not changed in centuries were suddenly raising
the country's cartographers from a sleep untroubled since the
forced removal of words like 'Kurdistan', as new roads
appeared all of a sudden, and old ones disappeared under new
lakes.According to the old man in a turban who sat next to me,
the weathermen were being kept as busy as the cartographers.
Ever since the lake had started to fill behind the dam a few
years back, he explained, the weather had been thrown out of kilter.
'Bozuk,' said the old man in summary as a grey veil of rain swept across the bus. The word meant broken, but in the grey light I might instead have heard 'bollocks' and he might have
been a cantankerous pensioner on a London bus cursing rain- clouds over Hackney. But then he wound himself up, stared at the sky, and claimed it was all Allah's doing, wrath ;a human interference on a scale that He had never intended, and I thought no more of Hackney.
The bus eventually turned on to the new road, and as if to mark the sheer smoothness of the ride the driver lit a cigarette
and flipped on a cassette of Arabesque music. His body snaked
in sinuous response as we headed through the pistachio trees
and the vines punctuating the mocha earth, among masses of
wind-blown poppies and cornflowers, and beyond them the
silvered evening expanses of the lake.
Below the dam, a small town had been built to serve the
numerous construction and maintenance teams. Lines of prefabricated
huts and a petrol station gave way to huge banks of
electrical plant squatting behind barbed wire before the open
road headed north, and gleaming pylons, like great navvies,
marched off towards the horizon in every direction with
cargoes of volts to power an infinitude of unshaded Turkish
light bulbs.
So grand was the scale of the constructions that even the
old man forgot his reservations, and told me how the dam was
marvelled at by people across Europe and America. But the
excited movements of his head were causing the turban to
unravel, and rather than disenchant him of the notion that the
dam was exclusively the Western topic of the moment, I only
wished to halt his frenzied movements before the entire
creation fell apart.'What a reputation,' I agreed admiringly, and the old man
sat back, honour satisfied and turban rescued from collapse.
Not many years ago, rainfall rituals had often been enacted
throughout this area to save a drought-threatened harvest.
Hanging a scorpion from a tree was said to help. So was
burying a snake alive. But the most effective method of
ensuring rain was to write a prayer on a dog's head and throw
the poor mutt into the river. Water, if not dogs, had always
been regarded as a sacred gift. In the earlier years of the
twentieth century, those about to be executed, even fez
wearing reactionaries, were offered a glass of water along with
an olive as a sign of peace. Now, the latest rainfall ritual was
to build an eight-turbine rock-fill dam, the fifth largest in the
world, so that water, no longer sacred, was finally cornered
and could at last be taken for granted.
But as it collected behind Turkish dams, those who
depended upon it in downstream Syria and Iraq regarded it as
increasingly precious. For Turks and Arabs had shared very
little ever since the Ottoman overlords had been kicked out of
Arabia and Mesopotamia during the Great War - except water.
That the Arab countries received water which had already been
used by the Turks was an unwelcome reminder of their former
subservience. Iraq and Syria may have won their freedom, but
the Euphrates and Tigris rivers still rose in the mountains of
eastern Turkey, still passed down the gullets and through the
systems of Turks before flowing south to humiliate them.
They felt like children dependent for sustenance on the
capricious whim of a brother tall enough to turn a tap beyond
their reach.
What the Arabs did with their water had never greatly
concerned the Turks. They did not damn Syria for damming
the Euphrates to create Lake Assad, named after the country's
president, in the seventies. But in January 1990, when the river
waters upstream were first withheld behind the great Turkish
dam near Adiyaman to create a lake named after the local
hero, Syria and Iraq were incensed. Filling Lake Atattirk wasprojected to take anything between five and ten years, during
which time the flow of water to Syria and Iraq was likely to be
around half its usual level. Damascus and Baghdad pointed out
that water might be the future cause of war in the area. The
reaction of the god-fearing old man on the bus did nothing to
suggest otherwise: 'What are they complaining about?' he
fumed. 'They've got oil, haven't they? Do they want to swap
water for oil, barrel for barrel? We'd be happy to.' And
everybody on the bus laughed.
I had come this way, however, even if via this unexpected
diversion, for another reason entirely. I wanted to see the
remains of a two-thousand-year-old civilization perched high
in the mountains, safe from the rising waters behind the Atattirk Dam. In truth, I was surprised at myself. I have never
been drawn to truly old things. Perhaps it is because I have
never in my imagination been able to breath life into them, the
complex relationships between ancient civilizations. The Hittites,
Romans, Greeks, Persians, the Assyrians, Lycians, Phrygians,
and Neo-Hittites, the Pamphylians and the Lydians, the
Medes and the Cimmerians, they all seemed so remote as to
be entirely unconvincing. All that stone, all that hieroglyph
was of a world that could be coldly interpreted but never
sensed, a world beyond reclamation. Until now, my own
journey had largely been through the manageable past, the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a past chronicled
by crinkly letters in spidery handwriting or the
impressions left by the keys of the earliest typewriters, by
fading daguerreotypes and even the living memories of the very
elderly, lives you could reach out to and touch where history
was still warm, still alive. And I was not sure what was
drawing me to the old bones, history's charnel house on
Nemrut Mountain.
Adiyaman was dark by the time we arrived. It wore the
standard-issue uniform of Turkish towns: shabby concrete,
brightly lit signs advertising, despite a missing bulb here and
there, banks and garages alongside the shacks of tailors andmechanics whose roofs were held in place by piles of old tyres
as new wiring spread in ivy tangles over defunct growth
hanging in loops outside the windows, and deeply shadowed
alleys where the deeper shadows of veiled women moved
silently. But that was not all: there was over-embroidered
decorative evidence of the recent civic prosperity that the dam
had brought; new Mercedes cars cruised around, and I
glimpsed sophisticated foyers and bright apartment buildings.
Street lights glittered with newness; street signs stood subaltern-erect,
not yet victims to the inevitable collision that would
tear the concrete base from the pavement and bend the signs
double at the midriff where rust would quickly set in.
It was all so impressive that I was not prepared to defend
myself against the approach of a young tout who entrapped
me despite my long experience of such things with that single
polished sentence of English delivered irresistibly: 'Hi. If
you're looking for Nemrut Mountain, perhaps we can help
you.' And he walked away without awaiting my response,
confident in the knowledge that I would not be far behind.
And so I came to be on the minibus, along with a Danish
blacksmith, his wife, and a veterinary scientist from Australia,
that rattled into the mountains the next morning. The sun was
shining and it was warm. Allah had clearly relented on dam
building.
We were untalkative as the minibus clambered up the track,
each leafing through the jottings of our own expectations. The
outside world had not known of the ruins on Nemrut Mountain
until 1881. Few visitors had come here until the seventies,
but since then they had come with great regularity, during the
summer months when the mountain was accessible, and
usually at sunrise, establishing it as probably the greatest
tourist draw in all of eastern Turkey. We had seen the
brochures, but our silence suggested that we still hoped to be
surprised by Nemrut Mountain.
The peak of Nemrut Mountain was the geographical and
spiritual heart of the Commagene kingdom, established a fewdecades before the birth of Christ as a buffer state between
the Roman and Persian empires. The Commagenes were a
one-hit wonder, the Kajagoogoo of Anatolian kingdomlets, but
evidently the Commagenes did not think of themselves as
such. By means of vast funeral mounds, monuments to the
power of posthumous publicity, they set out to be remembered.
It was obvious from the surviving evidence, however, that
nobody else expected the Commagenes to last. It was, for
example, an ominously Roman bridge, not a Commagene
one, which carried us across a tributary of the Euphrates and
into the Commagene heartlands. Built while they were in
power, the Commagenes might have thought to ask themselves,
if they had not been so preoccupied with the mounds,
why the Romans were prepared to invest in the transport
infrastructure of a region not their own. Somebody in the
Roman Ministry of Roads and Bridges, they might then have
realized, had been quietly tipped the wink to the effect that the
Commagenes might call themselves a dynasty but were to be
limited rather to a short period. And so it proved when the
Roman Emperor Vespasian cursorily incorporated the region
into the province of Syria in ad 72, and the Commagenes were
history, much of it forgettable, without so much as an
independence movement to their credit. This was perhaps
because they had not yet given their country a name, and an
independence movement in a country without a name is
unlikely to have a prayer.
But in their own way the Commagenes quite refused to be
forgotten. In death, at least, they would make mighty names
for themselves. Nobody had told them their glory might in
any way be limited, and they thus behaved as if divinity were
their absolute due. At Arsameia, the ancient capital of the
Commagenes, I trekked up the path with the Australian
veterinary scientist past fallen statues and bas-reliefs. The
valley below us was full of yellow and red flowers and hawks
hovered, as if they had been hung out to dry in the warm
sunshine.Just before the scattered ruins of the town stood a relief
showing Mithradates, the founder of the Commagene short
period, shaking hands with Hercules. Forgetting the fact that
he is naked, Hercules reminded me of a celebrity in the paid
endorsements business posing for a publicity shot. Perhaps he
is opening the Commagene equivalent of a supermarket. But
what nobody has told him is that, cast in stone, he will pose
naked with this Commagene nobody for ever. Nor can he
have guessed, such are the twists of history, that the site of his
ill-advised endorsement will come to be one of the most visited
in Turkey. Hordes of twentieth-century visitors will witness
his humiliation. Next to the two figures stands a huge inscription
in Greek, which forcibly suggests itself as a classic, early
' instance of unread contractual small print. Certainly Mithradates,
with the added advantage of being fully dressed, looks
to have pulled off quite a fast one. I found myself drawn to
these people as scraps of Commagene character were conveyed
across the millennia. Perhaps there was life in the annals of ancient history after all.
The minibus wound up the mountain between banks of
old snow. Peaks rose on every side. In this ancient kingdom
digested by Romans, by Persians, by Ottomans, and by
> modern Turks, we each found ourselves thinking of our own
countries and the issues of absorption and national identity as the Danish couple were reminded that it was their referendum
| day back home on ratification of the Maastricht Treaty on
European Union. They had registered 'no' votes before leaving
£ for Turkey. For his part, the veterinary scientist told me that
most Australians had had enough of their junior relationship
with Britain and were becoming increasingly republican. The
minibus came to a halt where the road ran out below the funeral mound of King Antiochus of the Commagenes, son of
Mithradates.
The anti-federalist blacksmith had poor legs and hired an expensive mule to carry him to the top while the rest of us set
off up the path. As we climbed, I considered the life ofAntiochus who had died young, possibly from One of those
violent delusions of grandeur to which he was habitually
susceptible. Antiochus apparently spent much of his time
assembling the family tree and ended up, on the basis of
spurious evidence, with an ancestry far more exalted than was
actually the case, doubtless a syndrome widely recognized by genealogists today. In Antiochus's case, it was Alexander the
Great of the Greeks on the one side and Darius of the Persians
on the other. In 40 bc, you couldn't claim more illustrious
antecedents than that.
Unless, that is, you claimed kinship with the gods. I
reached a large stone terrace running along the eastern side of
the mountain. The great peak of gravel and stones where
Antiochus was believed to be buried towered above me. Huge
decapitated figures were seated along the terrace to guard and
honour Antiochus's memory. Their fallen heads stood six foot
high at their feet while a chill wind whistled amongst them.
They looked out among stone lions and eagles and scraps of
fallen masonry, to the mountains on every side. If you could
match the bodies with their heads you would see four gods,
Apollo, Fortuna, Zeus, and Hercules, with Antiochus sitting
imperiously between them.
Antiochus's research of the family tree connecting him so
indubitably to Alexander and Darius had fitted conveniently
into the guiding principle of the time, which was to forge the
equivalent gods of East and West into single figures so as to
provide a cultural bridge between the various peoples, and
thus combat ethnic, sectarian, and religious frictions. Furthermore,
the combination gods on the terrace - the Sun God
Apollo was also Mithra, Helios, and Hermes; the local Fertility
God was also Fortuna and Tyche; Zeus was Ahura and Mazda;
Hercules was Artagnes and Ares - allowed Antiochus to make
shrewd room in the confusion for a statue of Himself, and
Himself uncombined.
Into this bombastic magnificence rode the Danish blacksmith on his mule. 'God,' he bellowed, forgetting referendums
and the petty aspirations of nations, and for a moment the
great heads seemed to prick up their stone ears as the single
word echoed round the mountain. A great gust of wind came
from somewhere, and a single shivering hawker grabbed at his
postcard stand as it skittered towards the mountainside. I
walked round the back of the funeral mound to the western
terrace, a mirror image of the eastern one where I noticed
further reliefs which featured Antiochus shaking hands - a
family trait, this - with Apollo, Zeus, and Hercules. The same
five stone figures, Antiochus and the flanking divinities, lay
fallen in banks of deep snow. / Antiochus, my guidebook
translated a relief for me, caused this monument to be created in
commemoration of my own glory and that of the gods,
I looked away. I could see the Euphrates like silvered thread
working its way down the valley until it was lost in the distant
cobalt-coloured suggestion of water backing up behind the
Ataturk Dam. The five stone figures looked west towards
Ankara, Istanbul, and Europe; beyond them and the burial
mound at their backs their eastward-facing counterparts looked
towards Iran and the heart of Asia. And as I looked at them,
their faces battered by the frozen winds of almost two thousand
years, framed by the carved curly locks of hair, I came to
notice their hats which, it gradually dawned on me, were what
had brought me here in the first place.
The stone heads on Nemrut Mountain were wearing fezzes.
Not all of them; Fortuna was garlanded with vines and fruit,
Apollo's hat was rather too flattened to be a fez, but the other
figures were prototype fez wearers all. I checked, and sure
enough there was evidence of tassles at the back of each hat.
Here were fezzes in the heart of Turkey, a thousand years
before the dervish sikke was ever invented. In the expanses of
past, I now realized, I might never find the origins of this hat.
But in knowing that, I also understood that the pursuit of the
fez to its beginnings was no longer the point, and I was gladto abandon it. For the first time, I realized, all that mattered
was what the fez meant. And now, in these fez-wearing ancient
Anatolians, that much was clear; for they were looking both
ways.
Over the centuries, succeeding generations may have
caused the fez to represent whatever best suited them, made it
variously masquerade, according to the times, as the badge of
Westernization, of Orthodox Islam, as symbol of Ottoman
loyalty, and even as a poor toy of tourism. But here on the
side of a desolate mountain, its true meaning was revealed as a hat that reconciled the disparate heads beneath it, that looked
both ways. Ancient history had astonished me.
Antiochus may have been a stickler for flashy send-offs.
His father may have shaken hands with naked gods. But there
was something that this pickaninny potentate had understood.
He had placated the Eastern and Western cultural elements that
were at variance in his society, melding into single unities
gods, beliefs, and value systems, so that what emerged was
neither Eastern nor Western, and both Eastern and Western at
once. Sultan Mahmud II's words upon the introduction of the
fez echoed around the ruins: 'Henceforth, I recognize Muslims
only in the mosque, Christians only in the church, Jews only
in the synagogue. Outside those places of worship, I desire
every individual to enjoy the same political rights and my
fatherly protection.' This was the way forward: that neither
West nor East might prevail, but that the two worlds might
coexist, and their conflicting ideologies might no longer collide
in the wreckage of car bombs and detentions, language laws
and burnt-out hotels.
On Nemrut Mountain they were at last looking both ways,
the Highway Code for the Turkish journey. Perhaps I had
found it, that better redemption still.






274

chapter twenty-one




The express coach left Adiyaman at midnight, travelling
so fast as to dump me in an unlit bus station at three thirty in
the morning. The option was the late-night post train from
the nearby town of Golbasi, or Lakehead, reputedly of a speed
so slow that the guard and his assistant were presumed to
disembark at every tiny junction and collect by hand the mail
from surrounding farm houses and hamlets. Which suited me
fine; I would wake at eight thirty, and climb refreshed from
the train into the full light of morning. That at least was the
idea.
So I abandoned the midnight express coach at Lakehead
and walked down to the station. The spring sky had bloomed
cold with haloed night lights. Ghostly outlines of freight trains
stood idle among the sidings. Through a soft-lit window I
could see the station master slumped at his desk. His peaked
cap had fallen forward like the snowplough front of a winter
train. When I knocked at the glass to check departure times
with him, his head rose as if from the depths of a swamp, he
regarded me with a sleepy but withering indifference, and then
he settled upon the cushion of his other cheek.
1 had not appreciated what it meant to be a post-train
traveller. Post-train travellers were not entitled to make irksome
demands of the station staff. They were here on sufferance,
the disenfranchized, travelling underclass, expected to sit
patiently in the waiting-room until a brusque face appeared at
the ticket window. Then the queueing was dutiful and obedient,
as if we were in line for the soup kitchen. We were welfare
travellers, buying tickets that were vastly cheap even byTurkish standards. Mine cost 30p, which to pass the time I
calculated at 5p per travelling hour. In the waiting-room, the
spitting of nut husks, the flare of matches, and the gentle burr
of the stove combined to perform the distinctive soundtrack to
cut-price Turkish life.
Five pence per hour was certainly cheap, but did not prove
good value. When the post train finally hauled up at Lakehead
with those sacks of personally collected mail at three o'clock
in the morning, it also delivered a full complement of passengers
packed into cramped carriages foul with the smell of post
train feet. Only the kindness of a stranger provided me with a
seat when a child was hauled upright to make space for me,
father and son changing places so that the boy might not
slump against the stranger. The boy had been sleeping long
enough for sleepy dust to have formed along his eyelids.
Above us, fully grown men had taken to the luggage racks. I
sat wedged between two men so close that our arms were
pinioned, interfering with the passing of nuts, grapes, cigarettes,
and scraps of conversation. In this position, I free-fell
into sleep.
I awoke entirely unrefreshed to daylight, and rainwater
showering me through a window that yawed open with the
rhythm of the train. The men either side of me had disembarked
during the night, but in sleep I had remained in my
tucked-up position, like a mummified parachutist surrounded
by acres of untenanted space. I gently cracked the mould of
my bones, stretched up, secured the window, and looked out.
We had left the mountains for the rich rain-green of the
lowland plains. In coming to an end, the geology of Anatolia
was giving fifth-column indications of approaching Syria. We
were heading towards tarboosh territory.
A little later, a branch line carried me south into a low
landscape so distinct with its date-palm skyline and the oily sea
dark with shoals of fresh rain that I might have expected a
border. But as I looked from the window there was no such
thing, only a bedraggled child chasing a cat through puddlesand a huge steel foundry dissolving in the mist. A young
soldier opposite me picked his nose with an assassin's deliberation,
and discarded the bogey down the barrel of his gun. In
such a context, it seemed odd to find myself thinking of Steven
Spielberg.
In the last Indiana Jones movie, a scene opens to a background
of foliage, mosques, and minarets gilded in the dawn
light above the caption: republic of hatay. Spielberg's movies
are crammed with fancifully titled imaginary settings such as
this; it just so happens that the Republic of Hatay is not one of
them. The Republic of Hatay actually happened, and at that
moment my train was moving south across its old border and
entering the former republic on the way to the port of
Iskenderun. Now, where guards, flags, and border posts once
stood, were only the sodden cotton fields of the Turkish
province of Hatay, and a bogey drying in a gun barrel, a scene
that owed nothing at all to Steven Spielberg.
Instead, the dour descriptions of an early merchant called
Peter Mundy came to mind. 'It is very unwholesome,' he
declared of Iskenderun, 'by reason of the huge hills hindringe
the approache of the sun beams, until nine or ten a Clocke in
the mornings, lyeing in a great marsh full of boggs, frogs, and
foggs.' In the 1820s, disease was so prevalent in the town that
it was known as the Bane of the Franks. Iskenderun's tombs
were said to be more numerous than its houses. Ships that
moored here during the summer regularly lost a third of their
crews to disease. The agency factors based here were described
as having 'a languid air, yellow complexion, livid eyes, and
dropsical bellies'. And they hadn't even arrived by post train.
So when we arrived at Iskenderun station forty minutes
later, far from the Indiana Jones version, with its period
Levantine buzz, the monkeys and parrots, the befezzed merchants
and porters, I was quite resigned to the train's mundane
lurch to a halt, the measured removal of a finger from a
soldier's nose, and a walk through puddles into town.
When Spielberg chose as the plot engine of his movie therediscovery of the Holy Grail, Iskenderun was an obvious
setting. For the city was the ancient gateway to the Holy Land,
landfall of Crusaders and pilgrims alike. In Spielberg's version,
the chase for the Grail begins when it is discovered that a
passing Crusader knight of the eleventh century apparently
concealed it in the area. 1938, meanwhile, was presumably
selected by Spielberg as a prime year for Nazis. With all the
Grail chasing and Nazi bashing, it is no surprise that Spielberg's
characters failed to realize just what an interesting time
they might have had in Iskenderun in 1938 by simply stepping
out of fiction.
In the version according to Spielberg, Hatay's 1938 leader
dressed as an oriental potentate, all decked out in spangle,
glitter, robes, and turban-wrapped fez. In fact, the President
of Hatay favoured a suit, tie, and homburg. At the time, no
more effective means of expressing secular, reformist, pro
Turkish tendencies was available. The President would not
have been seen dead in a fez. Rather than a mere sartorial slip,
Spielberg's version served to miscast the President's fundamental
ideology. Had this version held good, had the President
actually been a fez wearer, then history might have followed a
quite different path. The forgotten border that I had crossed
that morning most likely would still exist and in my passport
a fresh stamp would read Republic of Hatay, or even the
Syrian Arab Republic.
In the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire, Hatay was slow
to resolve itself upon a chosen future. This littoral twenty
miles wide by seventy long was Ottoman by tradition but by
geography Syrian. Hatay belies Turkey's rectangular integrity,
a nub of land protruding hernia-like from its southern underbelly.
As a territorial enhancement, Turks are quite sanguine
about their spoilt border symmetry. Not so the Syrians, who
regard the loss of Hatay not only as a grevious wound in the neat
square of their own geography but as a national humiliation.
On maps drawn in Damascus, Hatay is still depicted as Syrian.
Iskenderun, meaning Alexander's City in Turkish, wasfounded by Alexander the Great after his victory over Darius's
Persians at the nearby Battle of Issus in 330 bc. Under French
mandate between the wars, it was known as Alexandrette and
even at that time was considered a significant strategic prize. It
was remembered how, in the late nineteenth century, Iskenderun
had been proposed by the British as a terminal for a
railway to India, and even for a canal system linking with the
Euphrates and thence to the Persian Gulf that would rival
Suez. During the Second World War, the port was an important
disembarkation point for troops and equipment destined
for the Egyptian Front. Fearful as her mandate drew to an end
of offending either Syria, the natural claimant to the territory,
or Turkey, the influential regional power, France dodged their
respective tackles by granting Hatay independence in 1937, But
that independence would not last; the Commagene brush
with autonomy would prove to be positively dynastic by
comparison.
I found a hotel on the corniche where the Mediterranean
swilled noisily around the bay. But little else stirred except the
lank strand of hair in front of Hassan Bey the receptionist's
nut-brown eyes which seemed to be in perpetual motion,
unwinding like a telephone left to hang by its cord. He was
standing in front of a shiny array of conspicuously undisturbed
room keys. The hotel felt rather too big for the two of us. I
asked him how business was.
He spread his palms wide. 'Where do you want to start?'
'The Gulf War?' I suggested.
'Before then, well before then,' he replied gloomily. The
war in Lebanon and strained relations with Syria, he told me,
had already sidelined Iskenderun before Saddam's war forced
the Turks to close the lucrative Iraqi oil pipeline terminal at
the nearby town of Dortyol, or Crossroads. Sanctions on what
Iraqi trade remained had put the local hauliers out of business.
'And what you see,' said Hassan Bey, running his fingers
through the tinkle of unused room keys, 'is the result.' He
turned to write down my passport details.'English,' he said, noting my nationality. 'Turkish,' he then
added, jabbing at himself with his pen.
Only in Iskenderun, it struck me as I stepped outside,
might a Turk need to remind himself of his nationality. For on
the recognizable stream of Turkish that passed me in the street
floated the distinctive gutturals of Arabic. I, who had not seen
churches since Istanbul, now walked past Catholic, Orthodox,
and Armenian ones. Old men in spats and tortoise-shell
glasses, true Levantine dandies, walked back streets that were
not named, but numbered in the Parisian fashion. The clock
on the justice court, a building which looked to have been
transplanted here from the deserts of Beau Geste Arabia, was
made by Charvet of Lyon. In the restaurants, they were eating
hummus, the chick-pea paste of the Levant which I had
encountered nowhere else in Turkey. There was a dentist
called Alfred Beyluni. An export company on the waterfront
was called MacAndrews & Forbes whose business was exporting
bails of Turkish and Afghan liquorice for use in confectionery.
Alexander's great city may have become a town over the
years but its Levantine spirit, commercial and cosmopolitan,
evidently remained intact.
As early as 1581, the Levant Company, a major trading
organization, had been founded in Iskenderun. Peter Mundy
may not have liked it, but for traders such as himself it was the
only place to be. By the late 1600s, they were alerting Aleppo
to the news of merchandise arrivals at Iskenderun by carrier
pigeon, which covered the sixty miles in as little as two and a
half hours.
Given all this, Spielberg may be said to have redeemed
himself by correctly suggesting in his movie a marked presidential
soft spot for the kind of expensive foreign motor car in
which the Nazis pay court to the local potentate: 'Rolls-Royce
Phantom II,' Hatay's President purrs. 'Four point three litre,
thirty horsepower, six cylinder engine, with Stromberg downdraft
carburettor. Can go from nought to a hundred kilometres
an hour in twelve point five seconds. And I even like thecolour.' Over the years, the people of Iskenderun had acquired
a taste for the good things that come from across the sea.
And so it is that Spielberg's President gets the Rolls and the
Nazis get the archaeological run of Hatay in return. In fact, a
shady deal was brokered here in 1938, but it involved not
Rolls-Royces, a befezzed potentate, and Germans but territory,
Frenchmen, and Turks. As the Nazi threat loomed, the French
reasoned that possession of Hatay might bolster Turkish
vulnerability against Hitler's honeyed whisperings. So France
contrived the circumstances by which a Turkish annexation
might appear legitimate. Since 1939, the Turkish flag has flown
over Iskenderun.
As I wandered through the town, however, I noticed that
it did not hang alone. A sodden Union Jack was strung limply
to the flagpole above a surviving Ottoman mansion whose
blossom-filled garden ran down to the corniche. Brass door
plates variously advertised the building as home to the local
Lloyd's agent, Catoni's Maritime Agencies, and the British
Consulate. I remembered how Freya Stark had come here in
the fifties and succeeded in wangling the consul's car for a day
to explore the battlefield at Issus. Her example beckoned me
through the doors.
The British Honorary Vice-Consul to Iskenderun sat in a
large, bright office whose windows overlooked the geraniums.
The consul was female, Christian, and largely Syrian by origin;
like Iskenderun itself, Hannoud Alexander did not conform to
the Turkish pattern. Her story, like her surname, was in many
ways that of the town. The languages she had spoken since
childhood, French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, and Arabic, were
the languages of this Levantine port, and her work as a
shipping agent was the pulse which had brought it prosperity.
In her hands was entrusted one of the town's eight foreign
consulships; the names of the other consuls, Makzume, Levante,
Boutros, and Glyptis among them, sounded as unTurkish
as her own.
When Turkey annexed Hatay in 1939, non-Turkishelements who did not wish to become naturalized were given
the right to opt for Syrian or Lebanese nationality within six
months. Those who stayed included Hannoud Alexander, who
adopted a Turkish pseudonym, Hind Koba, for use when
required by Turkish officialdom. Since she was at ease in five
languages and could make a case to argue that she was
composed of several different nationalities, the imposition of a
second name was never going to trouble her.
Hannoud had worked for Catoni Maritime Agencies for
forty years. The Catoni family, whose origins lay in France
and Corsica, had established their agency in Iskenderun three
hundred years ago. In 1885, Augustine Catoni was appointed
British Consul and became Lloyd's agent for the town at the
same time, sixty years before the same appointments were
made in Beirut, Lattakia in Syria, and Mersin to the north in
Turkey, all ports which have now far outgrown Iskenderun.
As Catonis served British interests in Iskenderun, so the
consulship became ever more closely linked to the family
name. When, finally, there were no more Catonis, consular
positions fell to long-serving Catoni employees such as
Hannoud.
Hannoud showed me round the old house. In the upstairs
rooms, items of furniture appeared stranded in space, and the
air was musty as if it had not been disturbed in weeks.
Cobwebs were beginning to colonize the spaces above the
doors. Official consular visits, Hannoud told me, were increasingly
rare these days, and the consul chamber was gathering
dust. There were the first signs of leaking, brown discolorations
advancing across ceilings, and chunks of plaster cornicing
which had fallen like Christmas cake icing to moulder on the floors of uncurtained rooms.
The venerable shipping agency had fared as poorly as the
building which still housed it. The staff had shrunk, shutting
off unneeded rooms as they retreated towards redundancy.
When Hannoud had joined Catonis in 1953, the agency
employed forty people, and eight hundred British ships alonevisited Iskenderun annually. Now there were just five employees,
the once-sizeable British community was now numbered
at six, and the port statistics for 1992 revealed that just 1,605
ships in total had visited Iskenderun in 1992. In the port, they
had once loaded silk, cotton, and yarn from Aleppo, carpets
and rhubarb, and muslin from the caravans that came overland
from India. And unloaded, I imagined, Rolls-Royces from
Gravesend and railway track from Hamburg. Nowadays it
was coal arid grain, steel and fertilizers, and nobody seemed to
know nor care which way these grey commodities were
headed.
When I returned to the hotel that evening, Hassan Bey was
still standing in front of his brightly shining room keys. As he
reached up for mine, he deliberately swung his hands through
the surrounding keys to set them jangling as if with the hope
of renewed activity.
'Did you know there was a film, very famous in the West,
set in Iskenderun?' I told Hassan Bey, thinking that the town
might profitably sell itself on the Indiana Jones connection.
But Hassan Bey only lifted a finger and said, 'Midnight Express.' Like most Turks, Hassan Bey did not much expect Western
films to supply positive portrayals of Turkey.
Ever since the film's release in the 1970s, Turks have taken
great exception to Midnight Express. The film, which recounts
a young American's stay in an Istanbul prison after attempting
to leave the country taped to a considerable amount of secreted
hash, reveals its stance in a few bald lines: 'Justice in Turkey is
like asking bears to shit in a toilet'; 'They have special classes
for corruption at night school'; 'For a nation of pigs, it sure is
funny you don't eat them.'
But Midnight Express was only the most recent episode in
the litany of insults that the Turks have suffered at the hands
of the West. Hassan Bey and many others like him wondered
how Westerners could still consider them 'barbars', or barbarians.
In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther had prayed to be
delivered from the World, the Flesh, the Turk, and the Devil.For the Turk was Terrible, and Turning Turk was the final
heresy. 'Nose of Turk' was one of the ingredients that went
into the witches' cauldron in Macbeth along with such pleasantries
as 'finger of birth-strangled babe'. Out of a contempt
that masked fear, the British had called their dogs Sultan and
their pubs the Turk's Head ever since the days of Ottoman
supremacy. Before the days of coconuts, the British had shied
at wooden Turk's heads in country fairs.
But when Hassan Bey told me what had so enraged him
about Midnight Express, I discovered to my surprise that it was
something far more specific. 'In Midnight Express,' he said,
'somebody pisses on a portrait of Atattirk, no? And,' he added,
barely containing himself, 'they actually dress Turkish people
in fezzes.' For Hassan Bey, this was the final insult. For that
hat was what those Arabs wore. Unforgivably for Hassan
Bey, the film had confused Turks with Arabs. Tarboosh or tar
brush, his words reminded me how ubiquitous is prejudice.
Hassan Bey had not seen Midnight Express, in which
incidentally nobody pisses on Ataturk's portrait, nor is anybody
made to wear a fez. But his fury about fezzes persuaded
me to drop the Spielberg connection. For there are plenty of
fezzes in Spielberg's Iskenderun, historically accurate as it
happens. For Hatay was not yet Turkish in 1938, and the fez
was still legal in this distant corner of what Atattirk considered
the Turkish birthright.
The fez would not last. Iskenderun would soon become
Turkish, and subject to Turkish law. But if you listened to the
accounts of Hatay's absorption into Turkey you could hear
voices from behind Iskenderun's faded French shutters that
cried foul. France had betrayed them, the voices said. As late
as 1936, they explained, Syria's claim to Hatay had been
widely accepted. Even when the French compromised by
granting independence to Hatay in 1937, the republic was
linked by customs and monetary agreements to Syria.
But as the threat from Nazi Germany increased, the voicescontinued, the French became increasingly compliant to Turkish
demands. The imminent elections gave the Turks a pretext
to propose that their troops might usefully maintain order in
the young republic until the poll results were published. The
French assented.
Moreover, as the elections approached, eastern Turks were
said to have been bussed into Hatay to bolster the pro-Turkish
vote. The voting commission comprised three Turks and a
Frenchman in charge of an exclusively Turkish corps of
registration officers. In response, much of the non-Turkish
population boycotted the elections in disgust. Unsurprisingly,
the election results indicated that the local population favoured
accession to Turkey. Soon, the belated design of the Republic
of Hatay's flag was announced. It would be a white crescent
and star on a red background. It could be distinguished from
the Turkish flag, it was brusquely explained to those who
dared query it, by the fact that the star would be outlined in
white.
One afternoon, I walked through town beneath clearing
skies. 1 could hear the mingled sounds of church bells and
muezzins, of Arabic and Turkish. On the doorways of the
apartment blocks, I noticed the eclectic names of a disparate
people inscribed, and I wondered how long they might last,
these Levantes, Boutroses, Makzumes, and Alexanders before
they made way for rows of Ozturks, the 'Pure Turks' so
popular when surnames were introduced to Turkey but in
which was contained an exclusive, in-bred idea of nationalism
that would only offend cosmopolitan Iskenderun.
On the waterfront stood the town's statue of the Father of
the Turks surrounded by the sculpted figures of his sons and
daughters, the soldiers, peasants, and workers of the Turkish
Republic. The sheer size of the glistening black monument
suggested that Turkey's claim on Iskenderun and the surrounding
province of Hatay was non-negotiable. It was also
built, I figured, with more practical considerations in mind.Late one Monday night in 1960, just before Christmas, those
who did not consider themselves Ataturk's sons and daughters
had blown the previous statue to pieces.
The rains had washed free of dust the tender, translucent
leaves of the lemon trees, and the air was bright, vibrant with
the sense of imminent heat. Children were playing football on
rutted tracks amongst new washing and the ferreting of
chickens. I could hear carpets being beaten. I reached a
whitewashed archway and stepped inside the town's French
military cemetery.
Two boys on a bicycle were weaving between the graves
where cypresses threw long shadows. The dead were mostly
marked by single stones, rounded marble headstones inscribed
in black with a cross, name, regiment, number, and a date.
Among them were graves marked simply with the words 'soldat franqais inconnu'. Soldiers of the French colonies,
hundreds of riflemen from Algeria and Senegal, lay in mass
graves below inscriptions that only recorded their numbers.
Between 1919 and 1921, these nine hundred soldiers had
been landed at Iskenderun to play their part in the Allied
attempt to suppress the emergence of modern Turkey. Less
than twenty years later, the ground in which they lay would
be absorbed into the country whose birth struggles they had
tried to smother.
In the spring of 1938, a few months before the Hatay
elections, Atattirk set out in ailing health from Istanbul by
train, ostensibly to attend a series of military parades close to
the border with Hatay. In celebrating Turkish victories over
those same forces whose dead lay in the dappled shade of the
French military cemetery at Iskenderun, the Gazi publically
reinforced his claim to Hatay. The French hastened negotiations
over the territory in Turkey's favour.
Little more than a year later, on June 23 1939, two
documents were simultaneously signed. One, a Declaration of
Mutual Assistance signed in Paris between France and Turkey,
effectively foiled Axis attempts to woo Turkey. The other, inAnkara, provided for the cession of Hatay to Turkey. The
Germans and Italians, seeing a potential ally morally committed
to neutrality, furiously described the agreements as an
'infamous bargain'.
But Atattirk had not lived to see Hatay incorporated into
Turkey. The spring heat of that train journey to the south the
previous year had exhausted him. On his return to Istanbul,
he could hardly make unaided the short walk from the train at
Haydarpasha down to the presidential barge waiting to ferry
him across the Bosphorus. The Gazi was in the advanced
stages of terminal cirrhosis. Except in death, he would never
leave Istanbul again.
He died in Istanbul on the morning of November 10 1938.
They carried his body in state across the Galata Bridge and
down to a Turkish warship which ferried him across the Sea
of Marmara to the town of Izmit. There, his cortege boarded
the presidential train and Atattirk was carried to his beloved
capital while his people mourned him.
Atattirk had, however, lived long enough to know that the
outcome of the Hatay business was assured. When Turkish
troops had marched into Hatay at five minutes past midnight
on July 3 1938 that summer to oversee the elections, Atattirk
did not expect them to leave. And during the last few days of
his life, as the winter cold gathered in his bones, perhaps he
will have thought of that distant littoral, the final piece of the
jigsaw poised to complete the Turkish picture. And in his
dying thoughts, he may have looked forward to the day when
his followers among Hatay's population would finally tear
reviled fezzes from the heads of those that still chose to wear
them.
It was so entirely about hats, it struck me, as I lingered
amongst the graves. I thought how strange it was that the
French should have appointed to lead the Hatay negotiations
one Monsieur Bonnet, the aptly named Mr Hat. How strange
even that they should call this place Hatay, whatever its
indistinct meaning in Turkish.Perhaps this was how Ataturk's life had ended; a valedictory
vision of the people of Hatay, Turkish and Arabic,
Muslim and Christian, watching as their beloved red-felt hats,
whether they chose to call them fezzes or tarbooshes, were
stamped into the summer dust. And time to hear in the
crowing slogans proclaiming Hatay to be Turkish, the serving
of the death warrant on the lessons of compromise and
cosmopolitanism that had been passed down to the people of
Iskenderun from that distant mountain where Antiochus lay. Time to muse on the thought that the final few fezzes would
soon be ground into Iskenderun's dirt; that he had at last
achieved all he intended, positioned the final piece, and the
Turkish jigsaw was complete.epilogue




A week later, I sat under a tamarisk tree in a Turkish village
square, listening to cicadas chiselling holes in the drowsy quiet
of the afternoon. Summer had arrived and I could smell pine,
heavy and resinous, and oregano. Children were playing along
the foreshore. A man was painting the upturned hull of his
fishing boat a deep maroon. Chickens pecked at the dust. Two
children steered cattle through the village. On a wooden
balcony, a couple were mending fishing nets. A man in an
apron occasionally emerged from the nearby tea house to
collect glasses off the tables. And above the village, an old man
was working a small plot of land.
It was May 19 again. The year had come full circle but this
time I was some distance from Pomegranate, perhaps four
hours west by bus and maybe twenty years away. It felt as if I
had returned in time, and the man in the field above the village
might have been Mustafa Yildirim, the old farmer of Pomegranate
who had never understood his surname, and Turkey's
problems were banished as I sat in the shade of my tamarisk
tree.
From a distance, I watched the old man as he worked.
Eventually, he wiped his brow, rested his hands on his hips,
dropped his hoe, and walked down the path into the village.
As he approached, he caught sight of me and nodded. He
shouted for a glass of tea, sat down near by, and said that he
hoped I was enjoying my time in Turkey.
'You are travelling around?' he asked. 'A tourist?'
'Yes,' I replied. 'A tourist looking for fezzes.'
'Ah,' he said. 'A student of history. Or did you find any?'1 had found fezzes for tourists, I told him. In Pomegranate,
I told him, I had found them in the shops and on the head of a
man outside a restaurant. In Istanbul I had seen them in the
hotels, on the heads of mannequins in the museums, and on
gravestones in the cemeteries. I had seen some in the trinket
shops of Sivas, and one on the head of an ice-cream seller in
Diyarbakir. And I thought for a moment to have seen one on
the head of a man his age in Kastamonu.
'Thought tor a moment?' the old man asked.
'Well, I thought it was a fez. It was felt and red, just like a
fez. I remember the man walking past the vegetable stalls in
the market but he disappeared and 1 never had a chance to ask
him. But when I asked others about it, they told me it was no
such thing.'
'Well, of course they told you that!' the old man exclaimed.
'We are not so proud of our fez wearers. But a fez is hard to
mistake. If you think you saw a fez in Kastamonu, then I
should say that you did, especially if you came for no other
purpose than to find one.'
As he spoke, 1 began to understand more clearly why I had
come. Looking back, I realized that the fez had been the means
to an end, no end in itself, for I had failed to trace this elusive
hat to its origins. But now it seemed that to have done so
would have been to pin it like a butterfly to a board, and I
preferred to let it drift free in a distant, uncertain past. The end
had been Turkey herself.
The fez had guided me to the divisions that modern Turkey
denied, the divisions that would always leave Turkey at odds
with herself but that made her intriguing, endlessly different,
and, finally, the country she was. All she could do was heed
the example of the fez and strive to balance herself above the
oppositions that claimed her.
Still, it meant something, that one genuine Turkish fez
sighting finally confirmed, for it was perhaps the last one.
Soon, it would go the way of the others but when it had, Icould at least say what I had seen, defiant and unbowed, that
day on the snow-trudged streets of Kastamonu.
'And now,' asked this inquisitive old man, the first Turk
to have admitted fezzes might still endure in his country, 'what
will you do?' The question would do for Turkey. What would
come of this country torn by ideologies where they ruthlessly
ploughed under the past only for it to germinate in the present?
A country where every action spawned a reaction; where the
hanging of fez wearing religious reactionaries led by turns to
the car-bomb deaths of bare headed secularists; the erection of
statues in every square and the explosions that destroyed them,
and the erasure of saintly faces from Cappadocian frescos; a
country where they bared their breasts or shrouded themselves
in veils; lost themselves in the banal Western blandishments of
Pomegranate or prepared for the law of the Islamic sheriat. What would Turkey do?
'I don't know,' I told the old man, thinking I might linger
for a few days. 'I can't decide.'
'Hah!' the old man exclaimed, rising to his feet. 'You can't
decide, and neither should you. Whenever we Turks decide,
we seem to injure ourselves. We hurt each other. Indecision,'
he said, thumping the table in front of me. 'Indecision, not
ideology; that's the whole point of being Turkish.'
The man arrived with the tea to the sight of the old man
standing over me, waving a cigarette, clearly exercised.
'Hey, Mustafa amja,' the tea man admonished him. 'Leave
the tourist alone. Is he disturbing you?' he then asked, turning
attentively towards me.
'Not at all,' I replied. 'He's explaining the whole point of
being Turkish.'
As the evening muezzin sounded over the village and the
sun set, turning the water to mica, I called out for two more
glasses of tea.bibliography




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293

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I am also indebted to Patricia L. Baker's essay 'The Fez in Turkey: A Symbol of Modernization', which appeared in Costume Magazine,and to the following newspapers: The Times, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Financial Times, all London; the New York Times; the Egyptian Gazette, Cairo; the Turkish Daily
News, Ankara; and Dateline, Istanbul.