Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  By this stage, the press was beginning to pick up on the catastrophe, with regular updates in the London Times, despite the news distraction of the American Civil War. And stories came in from Inebolu, and then from Varna, to show that the situation in Trabzon and in Samsun was repeated all round the Black Sea coast.

  An account in the Liverpool Mercury on 25 June showed conditions in Varna, which is now in Bulgaria but was then an Ottoman port, were every bit as terrible as in Samsun. Steamers had dumped the refugees on the shore, leaving them to live in the open air, and smallpox was rife. ‘They say, “We all have had it, or have it now”, and I can answer for the truth of this, for nearly every man, woman, and child is marked, and in hundreds the face and hands are quite raw with it. Since I have been here (three weeks) 300 at the lowest estimate have been buried in the sands outside the town. They all say they died of cold. We have had much rain, especially at night, and these poor wretches have had to sleep out in it with nothing to cover them but their ordinary clothes, consisting only – in the case of the women – of a sort of long dressing gown and a pair of trousers. After one of these nights the dead lie thick on the ground, the others longing, I should think, to follow them,’ the letter said.

  It took the Ottoman Empire several months to organize its response to the crisis, although even that was inadequate. The captain of a ship carrying Circassians to Cyprus was so brutal that the passengers revolted, causing him to have many killed and thrown overboard. Of the 2,346 embarked, only 1,362 arrived at Larnaca, while other ships reported seeing bodies in the sea off Rhodes. Circassians in Anatolia revolted too, and the slave markets were flooded with the victims.

  By September, Stevens wrote from Trabzon that most refugees had now been moved from the town and from Samsun, having left 100,000 bodies in the hastily dug cemeteries.

  A visitor today would never know now that Akchakale had once been a refugee camp. The fort that de Fonvielle saw from the sea is still there, with a scattering of houses and a mosque on the slopes behind and around it. But there is no monument, no organized cemetery, and no Circassian population. On the two days I was in the village, one of the beaches where the Circassians landed was dotted with white sun loungers, but there was no sun and no one to lounge on them.

  I hunted local people to tell me about the events, assuming that a disaster of such proportions would have been passed down in local folklore, but was amazed to be greeted by looks of blank disbelief. A group of middle-aged men by the beach looked at me as if I was mad when I questioned them about Circassian cemeteries, while children had no idea what I was talking about.

  Eventually, my translator and I sat down by the mosque to drink one of the Turks’ tulip-shaped glasses of tea before heading back to Trabzon. As we sat and talked in English, a small crowd gathered to stare at us curiously and wonder what we were doing in their village. I kept being brought fresh glasses of tea, and kept explaining my interest in the Circassians. It was at this point I met Ali Kurt, aged eighty, who sat down at our table, fixed his dark eyes on me and began to talk as if he had been waiting for us to come his whole life.

  ‘When I was a boy, we were planting nut trees and we found these bones you are talking about. These Circassians came here before I was born, they died of typhus, and they are buried on the hill,’ he said, delighted by his audience of astounded fellow villagers, none of whom seemed to have heard the story before.

  ‘It was a huge catastrophe. If you dig down just fifty centimetres you will find bones, like sand on the seashore, there are so many.’

  He summoned his neighbour, and we drove jolting up a rough track that ran under the coastal highway, and onto the hills that tower above the village. Within minutes, we were looking straight down onto the mosque’s minarets and the thin coastal strip where de Fonvielle arrived in 1864. After ten minutes or so, we came to the hamlet of Teke, which was not marked on my map, but which was the last resting place for many of the poor refugees of 1864.

  A man with a white beard and a flat cap had joined us. He also remembered finding bones in this orchard when he was a boy, although now there was nothing to distinguish it from any other field in the vicinity, except perhaps for the lush exuberance of its hazel trees.

  ‘I found a skull with gold teeth,’ announced Ali Kurt, in a sudden upheaval of memory, before turning quiet when I asked what he had done with it. After a moment’s pause, he admitted he and his father had thrown all the bones into the sea. He expected me to criticize him, I think (‘What could we do?’ he asked. ‘There were too many of them’), but I understood.

  Just the day before, I had walked along the base of the cliffs below the castle and found a small cache of bones in a crack in the rock. One appeared to be part of a pelvis, while another was half of a jawbone. I wondered about taking them back to the Caucasus with me and burying them, but in the end I too succumbed to the temptation for the quicker route, muttered a prayer or two, and threw them to the north, towards Circassia, and watched them vanish under water.

  De Fonvielle landed on these rocks, probably 200 or so metres to the east of the fort, after his terrifying voyage. He buried his face in a stream that still skirts the base of the rock, although now it is choked with plastic bottles and old car tyres, and drank his fill. He had not eaten or drunk for two days and was weak with hunger, and was desperately relieved to be off the boat.

  But he quickly discovered that he had celebrated too early. The Turks feared the epidemic diseases the Circassians had brought with them, and had ringed the camps with guards to stop the emigrants from escaping and infecting other areas. The situation was desperate. The refugees were sheltering under olive trees, with no houses or tents. They had almost no food, and they received rations from the government that were barely enough to live on. De Fonvielle watched as three boats loaded with bread came to the shore to feed the Circassians, but their loads were sufficient for just half of the crowd, and most of the Circassians were forced to go hungry for another day.

  De Fonvielle decided he had to escape from this lethal encampment, where funerals filled the evenings of every day. ‘Four men carried the dead on their shoulders and the family followed; the women went a little way behind, letting out terrible cries. This is called bewailing the dead. I heard this crying in the Caucasus, but in Akchakale there were so many dead people, that these concerts became intolerable.’

  He searched the camp from one end to the other, until he finally found an old rogue called Akhmed relaxing in a shed. Akhmed boasted of a ship faster than any coastguard in the Black Sea and promised to take him to Trabzon.

  At this point, de Fonvielle’s wicked sense of black humour, perhaps unsurprisingly, appears to fail him. According to the text of his story, which I found in pamphlet form in a bookshop in the Caucasus town of Maikop and which was published by a Circassian firm, he wrote: ‘You know they were my friends, my comrades-in-arms, but at the same time I knew that they were doomed to certain death; this thought tormented me, particularly since I knew I could do nothing to assist them.’

  The ending surprised me, since it was so out of character. I would have expected a last rapier-thrust of wit to defuse the horror of his story. A de Fonvielle who gave in to gloom at this stage was not one who would have noticed the details he recorded earlier on his trip.

  It was, therefore, with a sense of relief that I found a second edition of the essay: this time published as a pamphlet in Ukraine, and which had a distinctly different last paragraph. In this un-bowdlerized version, his tale ends thus:

  ‘Slowly the cries of the Circassians were lost in the distance, and soon I could see only the red specks of their fires. Despite all the joy I felt, my heart was full of sorrow when I remember the terrible destitution of these unfortunates, whose hospitality I had enjoyed and whom I was now leaving, maybe for ever. The old smuggler was unmoved; nothing that happened around him disturbed him in any way . . .

  ‘ “These poor Circassians, how unfortunate they are!” I said to hi
m, trying to find out how hard-hearted he was.

  ‘ “This is how the Almighty wills it,” he replied in a quiet voice.

  ‘ “But they are dying of hunger and cold.”

  ‘“Yes, the Circassian girls are going to be cheap this year in the markets in Istanbul,” the old pirate answered me eventually, in a completely calm voice.’

  And they could not be anything but cheap, being so plentiful.

  According to official figures, slightly over a quarter of a million Circassians left Russia in that winter and spring of 1864. If we include those who left earlier and later, the best estimate I can find is that between a million and 1.2 million Circassians fled to set up a new life in Turkey, of whom 300,000 – 400,000 died.

  The Circassians that survived were dispersed, some being sold, most being settled on marginal land where their warlike qualities could be of use to the Ottoman Empire, and all being forgotten by a world that had once praised their battles against the tsar’s armies but had ignored them in their desperate hour of need. Their destruction was almost complete.

  7.

  A Pear Tree in the Mountains

  I stood at the base of the fort in Akchakale and wondered how many Circassians had looked out from this point towards the blue horizon of the Black Sea, and strained their eyes as if they could somehow reach beyond it – to the hills of their homeland away to the north. For those unhappy immigrants of 1864, the road back was closed. Their future lay to their south, in the villages that would be assigned to them by the sclerotic Turkish government.

  But the world has changed since then. Turkey and Russia have both lost empires, but have developed trading links. Ferries run three times a week between Trabzon and Sochi: an ugly, wonderful Russian city on the Black Sea coast. I decided to catch a ride with one, to see what was left of the homeland of the miserable refugees.

  The ferry ride was a twelve-hour exhausting journey in a baking cabin and we arrived twelve hours late. Still, as we approached Russia I was wriggling with excitement. I had left Russia two years previously and was delighted to be going back. I sat on the deck and watched dolphins bounding over the sea to examine us. They would approach exuberantly, then vanish beneath the waves again, disappointed to find just a dirty old steamer.

  The first glimpses of the mountains came with evening. A line in the clouds was too sharp to be made of air and water vapour, and over time resolved itself into a dip between two mountain peaks. Patches of snow became visible, slightly yellower than the clouds behind, and soon touches of the mountain range stood out first in one place, then another, as the visibility shifted with the evening air. A high valley was quite clear for ten minutes then merged back into the haze. A mountain’s shoulder emerged in its place. Gradually, the coastline itself rose out of the sea, revealing the densely furred hills of the lush west Caucasus, dotted with houses, some of them small and discreet, some of them the brutal towers loved by Soviet architects.

  Although Sochi is a town that welcomes more than a million tourists a year, its impact on the coastline is less than that of resorts in some other countries. The hills remain wooded, and the tourist infrastructure is tucked away among the trees.

  This is the star of the Russian tourist industry, where Stalin and other Soviet leaders chose to relax, and where they concentrated their efforts on building a holiday zone for the workers.

  Sochi’s use as a holiday resort was pioneered in 1872, just a few years after the Circassians left for ever. A certain F. I. Grabe, taking advantage of the combination of a temperate climate and a complete absence of people, built a villa here, and within two years fifteen other families were living nearby. The development was given a sharp impulse by the completion of the coastal road in 1891 – 2, which finally gave the Russians the ability to move quickly through these hills that had always frustrated their efforts to defeat the Circassians.

  One Russian writer recorded: ‘Sochi is our Toulouse, our Biarritz, our Bordeaux, but it stands a long way above them, because it is warmer and more picturesque.’ Another, a doctor who investigated Sochi’s potential as a place for treating the sick, went further. ‘Sochi is not only the best corner of Russia, but of the whole world,’ he wrote.

  By 1902, Sochi was home to thirteen hotels, and more were being built all the time. Simultaneously, doctors built sanatoria where invalids could take the waters, and be treated with the most modern techniques.

  These sanatoria were to be the drivers behind the sudden development of Sochi that followed the Soviet government’s nationalization of the resorts in 1919. As it invested in industry, it also invested in holidays for the proletariat it was creating. Perhaps it did this for ideological reasons, or out of the kindness of its communist heart, but I like to think the sanatoria it built were pit-stops: where the tired, damaged workers could be repaired by skilled medical staff, before being sent back to work once more.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union’s factories were full of danger and pollution. The workers lived cramped up, several families to a room, in damp and dirty conditions in the filthy cities or the new growing industrial towns. No human could live for long like that and stay healthy, so giving them breaks made economic and political sense.

  ‘Centres of relaxation are organized with the aim of giving the workers and the state employees the chance of regaining their strength and their energy during a yearly regular break in the most pleasant and healthy conditions,’ wrote the government in a decree in May 1921. In short, the workers would receive holidays so they could work better. They would get sunshine and balmy breezes for a week or two, then they could return to Siberia or the Arctic and eat bad food, drink too much and work too hard until next summer.

  A pamphlet published in 1924 and called Resorts of the Black Sea and the North Caucasus praised the region for its hot springs and mineral lakes, its mud baths and its hill-walking. The only reference to the people who lived in this southern land of mountains and beaches are a handful of pen-and-ink drawings of men in the typical dress of the mountains. The implication is clear: you did not come to the south to talk to the people who lived there or to think about its history. You came to get well again in virgin territory which the Soviet Union could exploit as it saw fit. The people were picturesque details, like animals in a zoo.

  The expansion in the number of holidaymakers, despite the Soviet Union’s need to rebuild after the civil war that followed the proclamation of the workers’ state, was staggering. In 1921, just 4,565 people came to Sochi on holiday. Six years later, the number was 21,443. By 1935, the state had given up providing exact figures, and claimed 118,000. The growth was checked by the Second World War, but took off in earnest in the 1950s, when the government stopped bothering with even vaguely specific statistics. By 1960, it said 500,000 people were coming here every year, and by the late 1980s five million were.

  It was an astonishing transformation for a patch of coastline that had been home to just the Circassian tribesmen until their expulsion in the 1860s. Hotels and sanatoria dotted the shorelines, and these were the tall towers I could see from the ferry as we neared the shore. The port building is handsome, with a spire and a clock. By the time our ferry had come close enough for us to read the time, the passengers had collected their passports from the purser, gathered their belongings and headed for the stern, where we would disembark.

  Apart from me, a British student called Geoffrey and a Circassian lady professor, the passengers were either Russian women or Turkish men. The split reflected the divides in the economy in the two countries.

  The Turkish men were heading to Russia to work in the booming construction trade. Many of them had done it before, and the ferry was the cheapest and most convenient way to get to Sochi, where new hotels were going up all the time.

  The women were a different case entirely. As we lined up on the gangplank, I spoke to two of the women ahead of me. They said they had been tourists in Turkey, and were returning to Russia to renew their visas before going ba
ck. The stories sounded flimsy. A Turkish tourist visa lasts for two months, and it seemed unlikely they could take such lengthy holidays and still want to go back for more. Besides, the towns they had visited were well off the tourist trail, too small to even be mentioned in my thick guidebook. These women were clearly not just tourists.

  Then I remembered where I had seen one of them before. As Geoffrey and I had sat and drank beer in the ferry’s restaurant the evening before, she had got up and done a ponderous strip-tease. She was clearly what the Turks call a ‘natasha’ – one of the small-town prostitutes who flooded into Turkey with the demise of the Soviet Union, and who provide to this day the raw material for the country’s sex business. The two women I spoke to had been based in small towns along the Black Sea highways, presumably doing business with the truck-drivers, and never visited Istanbul or the Mediterranean coast where Russian tourists throng in summer.

  The strip-teaser had been clearly seeking to drum up a little more business before she went home. I cast my mind back to the cheap hotel where I had stayed in Trabzon before we sailed, and the exaggerated cries of ecstasy that came through the thin wall from the next-door room. I wondered if any of my fellow passengers had been working there too.

  We had a long wait for passport control, as is always the way in Russia, but the customs officials were friendly and the women, once they realized we were not trying to hire them, proved good company. Sochi was just the other side of a glass door, and then we were outside.

  As I looked up towards the towering hotels and the neon, however, I failed to notice the threat closer to hand. Before I knew what was happening, a fat policeman had demanded to see my passport, grabbed it from my hand and marched off. Geoffrey and I had been towards the end of the queue, and the policeman had already corralled a miserable-looking group of Turkish men before we emerged. We tagged along with them and straggled after the policeman. He had a large bottom, and walked as though his trousers were chafing him, but he set a good pace and we had to struggle to keep up.