At the entrance to the market, and up a hidden staircase, is one of the best restaurants in Istanbul, run by a Greek whose original place was wrecked during the savage anti-Greek riots of 1955. It takes a lot to discourage the tenacious Greek, whose people were in Asia Minor long before the Ottoman Empire.
Beyond the spice market is the street market, which resembles an Arab souk. Mostly the shops sell cloth,clothes, stockings, shoes, the Greek traders rushing out,with cloth unrolled, at any potential customer, the Turks passively waiting. Porters shout; everyone shouts; you are butted by horses, knocked sideways by loads of bedding, and, through all this, you see one of the miraculous sights of Turkey—a demure youth carrying a brass tray suspended on three chains, and in the exact centre of the tray a small glass of red tea. He never spills it; he manoeuvres it through chaos to his boss, who is sitting on the doorstep of his shop.
One realises there are two breeds in Turkey: those who carry and those who sit. No one sits quite so relaxedly,expertly, beatifically as a Turk; he sits with every inch of his body; his very face sits. He sits as if he inherited the art from generations of Sultans in the palace above Seraglio Point. Nothing he likes better than to invite you to sit with him in his shop or in his office with half a dozen other sitters: a few polite inquiries about your age,your marriage, the sex of your children, the number of your relations, and where and how you live, and then,like the other sitters, you clear your throat with a hawk that surpasses anything heard in Lisbon, New York, or Sheffield, and join the general silence.
Not all sitters are pleasant to look at. In Istanbul, as in many Turkish towns, there is a horrible population of half-men—the legless, the paralysed, the withered—who sit in their wheeled trays. The East conceals nothing, and you are astounded to see how many of these creatures are handsome, domineering, and lordly, and how they look contemptuously at your legs as you pass.
Now you come to the Grand Bazaar, the enormous, arched city-within-a-city of shops. You wander under the white arches, in an area that is really three or four large department stores spread out on the single floor of a labyrinthine cave. Here is the alley of the carpet-dealers,here of coppersmiths, here of furniture, jewellery, silks.You buy anything from leather for your shoes to pianos,from a ring to a bedroom suite. The scene can be matched in Cairo or in the cities of India, but here it has turned drab since 1922, when Kemal Attatürk ordered Turkey to be Western, though it is still fantastic to the Western eye.
Only beyond the Bazaar, on the promontory where the palace of the Sultans stands with the domes of Saint Sophia and the Blue Mosque, do you recover something of the magnificence of the city. Here you stand before one of the most beautiful skylines in the world. Sunrise or, best of all, sunset is the time to see it, especially from the hills of the Golden Horn or from the sea. Then the steel-grey domes become black cut-outs against the sky and the delicate minarets prick it like daggers. One might be looking at some magical city floating on a carpet in the air, a place voluptuous, brilliant in design, and with a beauty that is cruel and vacant. To obtain precisely this effect of a dome floating free in the air without noticeable support was the ambition of the builders of the mosques;and inside them the illusion is triumphant.
The exquisite kiosks or summer houses in the palace are the work of a virile race at the peak of its civilisation,but also in all the sumptuousness of its decadence. And the towered walls of old Istanbul encircle the palace ruinously. Earthquakes rather than sieges have cracked the towers and sent down tons of their masonry, but the remains stand massively in decay for miles, and they remind one of the Ottoman power. Now, in the crannies,are the slums and gypsy camps of the city.
Many travellers have found in Istanbul the stagnant melancholy of cities long past their great period. The modern Turk has little regard for the past. He has pulled down whole quarters recklessly in a fever to spend money and be modern at all costs. Istanbul, like other European cities, is being hacked to pieces by speculators in land and property. But the situation of Istanbul is indestructible.The little towns and harbours of the Bosphorus are prim but pretty; and exiles from the city talk with affection of past summers spent on the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara about twelve miles from the Golden Horn,swimming off lazy beaches in the white heat haze.
When the air is leaden on the mainland, you can refresh yourself by going over to the islands. On week-ends the ferries are crowded with families who, if they are rich,are going to their island villas. These are in the extraordinary and traditional style of Turkish timber-building,strange fretwork places, carved in every inch, and they stand in scented gardens cut out of the scented scrub.
On these islands there is a silence one had entirely forgotten. No cars are allowed there; there is no petrol, anyway. Some of the trippers hire a horse carriage and trot up to the pine woods to picnic on the hot promontories that go violently down to the sea. Others stay in the sultry little ports and eat at the restaurants on the quays. They eat the excellent fish that comes down the Bosphorus from the Black Sea, and mussels fried and served cold, in their shells, with rice and raisins. Drinking water has to be brought from the mainland. There is good strong beer everywhere in Turkey, and drinkable light wine; but the mass of people drink fruit juice, goat’s milk, or water.
After their meal they make for the pastry shop “for something sweet”. The Turkish craving, not to say greed, for sweet things—nougats, marzipans, Turkish delight, almond pastes, and sweet creams—is not inhibited by any regard for the figure; both sexes are delighted by embonpoint and contented chins. In any case,the sugar is a source of energy in a climate that constantly saps it. One of the island sights in autumn, when the season is over, is the rows of refrigerators on the quays. The rich are taking them back to their houses in Istanbul. They will be loaded on to some strong man’s back.
To understand the basic conflict in Turkish life and probe into the dilemmas of Westernisation, one has to cross the Bosphorus and take the plane or the night train to Ankara, the modern capital—and afterward visit the real Turkey, the long, burned-up stretches of the Anatolian steppe and the primitive mud-walled villages and little towns of the interior. In this region of treeless distance and arid mountain Kemal Atatürk arbitrarily placed his capital after World War I. He chose a deep,wide valley where water could be brought, and there he planted a modern German-style city of wide boulevards and pleasant suburban streets.
Under Atatürk the Caliphate was abolished. Religion came under control of the state. The Latin script replaced the Turkish or Arabic. The powerful Moslem sects and secret societies, such as the dervishes of Konya, were dissolved. The story has often been told of how Atatürk banned the wearing of the fez and threw his own fez to the ground. Much excitement was caused in the outside world when he made the wearing of the veil illegal, but the continuous wars had already done something to emancipate Turkish women, and the formal veil, strictly worn, was a town fashion rarely adopted by peasant women, who worked beside the men in the fields.
Atatürk’s policy of making Turkey Western and of industrialising the country by drastic, expensive state planning has been followed by every Turkish government since his death in 1938. A very large part of Turkish industry is organised by the state, and Turks often say to Westerners, “We have had socialism before the rest of you. Why should we want a socialist party?” Most of educated Turkey supports this policy, and the nation today is fundamentally the work of intellectuals and technicians supported by the army. The educated also support Kemal’s wish that Turkey should become a typical parliamentary democracy with a party system.
I remember a distinguished and very formal old gentleman, a connoisseur of objets d’art, who showed me the treasures of the “Turkish corner” of his lovely modern house—the long pincers that had held the charcoal for lighting a Sultan’s cigarette, his lovely embroideries from the fifteenth century, his golden chalices, the little throne of cushions on which the master of the house had sat cross-legged. He translated
the Arab proverbs that were framed on the walls of his salon, those large, sweeping, elegant pieces of Arabic script in black on gold that are much admired in the Middle East. The Turk is addicted to proverbs: “Do not trust the man to whom you have done a favour.” Or “Take the straight path; if you wander by devious ways, you may fall into a hole.” He quoted one about simplicity: “A coat and a piece of bread suffice.”
My connoisseur had been educated at Heidelberg. A considerable number of educated Turks have been taught in Germany, London, Paris, or the United States. I spent much time with a vivacious and successful young play-wright who had been to Cornell—the theatre flourishes in Ankara and Istanbul, and many new theatres are being built—and it was he who came out frankly with a statement that a foreigner who has a regard for Turkish sensibilities must be careful not to make. The basis of ordinary Turkish life, he said, was tribal, rather in the tradition of the Welsh. I could not believe my ears when I heard the word “tribal” from a Turk; it is resented because in the remote frontier districts there survive primitive Asiatic nomads, the Kurds, who are slowly being assimilated. He meant the word in the sense of moral inheritance: the tribe traditionally cannot allow opposition; everything must be submitted to discussion until all, not a majority, are of the same mind. If there is one incurable dissentient, he must be thrown out.
“We are Westernising Turkey,” he said, “but in our own way, not yours; we are unlike you. We have had no feudal system. We have no bourgeoisie, no proletariat.What progress we have made has been the work of idealists, intellectuals, and soldiers—hence the strength of their position.”
What confronts the Westernised Turks is the gulf between their life in the fine modern flat with the superb view and the primitive life of the steppe. There is almost no link between the two. A few miles outside Ankara,one is back three thousand years in the mud-walled villages. There the women, dressed in floral-patterned trousers, and nervously drawing their shawls over their faces, sit among children on the roofs of their huts,spinning or making blanket coats for the shepherds for the winter, or squat on the ground cooking, with cow dung for fuel, among the animals they share their life with. They stumble over the boulders of the village street, carrying water on yokes. The goats and cows and chickens and geese wander among them. At night they light their oil lamps.
Hardly a tree is to be seen for tens of miles. The goats nibble the scarce, wiry, yellow grass and thistles, and very pretty these animals look, but as they wrench away every growing thing in their teeth, they make it more certain that soil erosion—the great curse of Turkish agriculture—will be worse the following year. You are looking at a landscape of stone; and over the rough road the white dust clouds hang for a quarter of a mile behind the passing lorry, obliterating the peasant as he trots on his donkey. There are perhaps 40,000 villages in Turkey, scattered and almost invisible until you come to them on the plain. And often no mosque marks the spot. In one of those mud villages outside Ankara, the state has built an agricultural college—it even has a Greek theatre—and a model settlement ready for occupation.An excellent, exemplary idea—but the wretched peasants cannot possibly afford the rents that will be demanded.
You travel about Anatolia by plane or by the local bus.I took the bus to Konya, a thriving town of over 100,000 inhabitants—a bone-shattering journey of 170 miles.At half past five in the freezing morning of the steppe,the bus station at Ankara is packed like a fair. You get a glass of hot goat’s milk from the cauldrons that stand on fires in the open; you buy one or two hard bread rolls—very good—for the journey, and so bang and rattle away.When the radio is turned off, couples quietly sing to each other.
The open landscape impresses with empty distances,clear sky, far-off mountains as pale as gas, the land grey or straw-coloured in the fierce sun, and at sunset, the mountains sharpening to violet, the plain turning to pink and then lavender, the sky clear green. At night the stars appear nearly to touch the earth.
The day on the steppe is unforgettable in its spaciousness and austerity. The only living things for miles, for hours at a time, are the herds of white or black goats. The only man-made objects are the tall crosstrees at the wells,each with a bucket hanging from the end of a pole twenty feet long; and the occasional circles of jagged stone by the side of the road, sticking up a foot or two at random angles from the ground, like rotten teeth. These patches of stone are village burying grounds, the most negligent,naked cemeteries I have ever seen. No sheltering walls surround them. The dead are out on the dusty steppe as they were in life.
Several of the women in our bus wore the traditional non-Western dress—the long blue cotton coat worn over baggy red, blue, or green cotton trousers, and the white,flowing head-dresses under which they could half hide their faces. Moslem habit—and the desire to protect the complexion—hangs on here. When we stopped, the women would get out and at once squat in the road directly behind the bus and wait there until someone gave them a push with his foot to get them up and into the bus again. In Konya itself—an important and thriving market town with new factories on the outskirts—half the women wore Western dress, but there were wonderfully beautiful and elegant women wearing a sort of low turban of twisted black-and-white cloth, the white veil up to the mouth, golden embroidered coats, and brilliant baggy red trousers bound at the waist by vivid bands of green and blue.
Konya has a modern boulevard and government buildings. It has a modern café or two, a cinema, some villas on the outskirts, and three modern hotels. It tries to be Western. You can buy paperbacks there: the Turks,unlike the clever Greeks, do read. Konya has the mosque of the whirling dervishes, a thirteenth-century sect of mystics, now suppressed. The dervishes are allowed to perform their ritual dance only in one week in December of each year, although one hears that this highly political sect still flourishes underground. This particular mosque is now, like Saint Sophia in Istanbul, a museum.
The silence of mosques is different from the silence of churches. It is the soft silence of the living-room. You take off your shoes at the door and enter what might be a luxurious drawing-room. The prayer carpets appear to blaze like red ground flame, a floor on fire. And when, as in the mosque of the dervishes, you look at the long,sloping tombs of the founder of the order and his kin,who lie under gorgeous embroideries, each with a large,startling turban wound round the phallic stump at the head, death seems disturbingly alive. These figures, one would say, still rule. Perhaps, secretly, they do. The effect is all the more macabre because the tombs are above ground, furnished and apparelled. One can imagine the dead throwing aside the trappings of the tomb and rising up to speak.
Konya is a small provincial capital, typical of the plain.Once famous and the seat of Sultans, it is now a market town dealing in grain and horses. The peasants drive in with their prettily painted horse carts, in which the grain is heaped loose, and pitch it on the floors of the dealers’s heds. The millstones grind. Scores of stinking, rickety horse cabs go through the streets; no one walks far if he can help it. The whole hot town smells of spice and horse dung. In the large back yards the country people sit on their bundles, their faces blackened by the sun, watching the dealers walk the horses around.
In Konya’s bazaar quarter the streets split up into trades. Here the coppersmiths and tinsmiths are beating out cauldrons three feet wide. Here are the rope-makers,the carpenters and—very important in Turkey—the makers of hard cushions and low divans, like floral car seats, for in Anatolia the peasant sits and sleeps close to the floor. They put their babies to sleep in hammocks.The activity of the streets is frantic; the smells are violent. The cripples and beggars rage from their place in the dust by the walls. The bus station is crowded with men, women, and children, loaded with enough baggage to take them across the world; all bus journeys are long in this empty country. In a quiet mosque you see the men sitting cross-legged in prayer. Outside, men and women are washing their arms, their hands, their feet, before going in. Food is simmering in large pans at the win
dows of the eating-houses or roasting in great stone ovens under blazing fires.
The foreigner need never be alone in Turkey. When I got off the bus in Konya, I was stupefied by the crowd.Three or four poor men came up at once to help, but I could not make myself understood. Then a young man with a few words of French came along. He attached himself to me, not as a guide or tout, but as a friend. We hired a cab; we ate fruit together, visited mosques. I noticed that, in good Moslem fashion, he always gave a coin to a beggar. Who he was, what he was, I cannot say; his French was not equal to it, but we were friends who gazed at each other like a pair of speechless animals.
He would not leave me until he handed me over to an English-speaking family who were on a visit from Ankara, and who at once took charge of me. The father was one more Turkish economist—he spends half the year in Washington and has great scorn for Western hotels, restaurants, and food. The best food in Konya,he said, was in the reeking little eating-houses, so we went around them while he shouted in at the doorways to ask what meat they had, and could he see it. We settled on a dirty, fly-infested place where he approved of the lamb. He picked out the best pieces for us, and it was excellent. It was served to us in an upper room under a great pile of those thick, spongy, flavourless pancakes you meet everywhere from Istanbul to Delhi, and eventually get a taste for, and we washed it all down with glasses of goat’s milk. The other customers were thin, ragged, ravenous workmen who tore at their food with their hands.
Often the Turks of the steppe seemed to me like the Spaniards of Castile, though without the pride and fantasy. The landscape is Castilian. Anyone who has travelled through the fantastic stretch of lunar pinnacles north of Almería in Spain, and seen the troglodyte dwellings in Guadix, will respond to the mad, whitish, ghostly landscape of eroded rock south-west of Kayseri in Anatolia. The town lies north-east of Konya. Here the rock is whirled into chimneys, tents, even human shapes. It is holed by caves which have been turned into dwellings—and even into churches, many with remarkable Byzantine frescoes.
Foreign Faces Page 16
