It was a report he’d written in January 1944 on the minorities in Içel, the province in which Mersin and Tarsus are situated. Sir Denis Wright stood up energetically (‘Right-ho, I’ll leave you to it’) and wandered out into the garden in his slippers, corduroys, and checked cotton shirt with cuff-links. He exchanged a few words with Iona – the niece of the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, the ultra-unionist Lord Craigavon – then headed off to the hut in a distant corner of the garden where he liked to retreat on a summer’s afternoon to rest and work.
Wright’s report identified three categories of minorities: Muslim, Other Non-Christian, and Christian. The Muslims consisted of a large Arabic-speaking population of around 25,000 Syrian or Arab Alaouites who lived in their own quarter in Mersin; about 400 families of Sunnite Syrians, including the Gandour family; and an assortment of Greek-speaking Cretan Turks, Kurds and Circassians, each of whose numbers were limited to no more than a few hundred. The Other Non-Christians were Jews (sixty-four families in Mersin, of which thirty-seven spoke Ladino and twenty-seven Arabic) and Gypsies. The Christians consisted mainly of Greeks, Armenians and Syrians, nearly all of whom spoke Arabic and French and Turkish. The Syrians, Wright wrote,
are disliked, mistrusted and envied by the Turks because of their origin, their religion and their wealth. With a shiny veneer of European manners, if not culture, acquired in Beirut, their way of life is more European than Turkish, they have no feelings of loyalty to Turkey and do little to conceal their contempt for the Turk. The flashiness of their behaviour in public and their group instinct (no doubt the result of persecution in the past) irritate the Turks, with whom they make no attempt to mix or, it seems to the outsider, to understand. They generally send their children to school at Beirut or to Robert College, Istanbul.
They are very conscious of the precariousness of their position here, and, given the chance, most of them would choose to return to Syria. Their present-day claim to be house-to-house, if anti-French, is probably not very deep, and their gushing friendliness for the British in Mersin is primarily because they see in the British Consulate their only protection and hope against their Turkish ‘oppressors’, though it is true that they do genuinely find the British more sympathetic than the Turks.
Allegations that many of these people were pro-Axis in the early days of the war should not be taken too seriously, and it should be borne in mind that any reports about their activities emanating from Turkish sources are likely to be coloured. They are not interested in politics, though some of them shewed a passing interest in the recent Lebanon crisis, and their only political concern at the moment is that Turkey shall remain out of the war. Self-interest and financial profit are their only gods. The Turks refer to them as ‘Hristian’ or ‘Arap’ with a contemptuous ring in their voices.
My first reaction on reading this was dismay at its portrayal of the ‘Syrian’ community – to which, after all, my family belonged. Had we really been (and might we still be) such a dreadful, flashy, self-involved crowd? I thought guiltily that in all the summers I’d spent in Turkey I’d only stepped into a Muslim house on maybe three or four occasions, and then only fleetingly; I thought about my grandmother shouting at the servants, about the motorboats and the private beaches and our tiny social circle. No, I could not deny our clannishness or snobbery, or that in the old days my grandparents’ few good Muslim friends were drawn mainly from the families of mayors, state governors, university chancellors and landowners (that said, employés of any religion were beyond the pale). I did not doubt that, as a group, we could be gratingly materialistic and lacking in the sophistication to which we pretended; but if the Syrians’ position was as precarious and marginal as Wright described, then surely for them the financial was political, and making money and spending it with a certain degree of ostentation was a vital form of cultural assertion? Besides, I had no problem with business culture; I knew something from my work as a lawyer about the dreams and exertions that may attach to bills of lading and letters of credit and exportation permits and finance facilities, about the necessity to deal and exploit and broke, to extract, by hook or by crook, a return from the rough world. The so-called Syrians, my mother’s people, worked in a very rough world indeed; a terrible climate, lethal diseases, an undeveloped economy, an alien host society: all had to be overcome. Everything was difficult, and everything – the houses they lived in, the port they operated, the churches they attended, Mersin itself – had to be wrought from nothing. Perhaps Freya Stark had sensed this when she wrote from the Toros Hotel, in April 1954, ‘There is something very touching in these little hotels, trying to be modern with such difficulties. The traveller is apt to feel cross and tired and wants things different, but when one thinks what a huge effort it is to get as far as they do, one feels very gentle towards them.’ Then again, even Stark was sufficiently anti-Levantine to eventually describe Mersin as a ‘squalidly rich little town’.
A political curiosity of the report – which, knowing Wright as I did, I took to be fundamentally reliable – was that I had never myself heard the Christians in Mersin talk of themselves or, for that matter, of the Kurds, as an oppressed minority. The Kurdish situation very rarely came up in discussion, even though the war in south-east Turkey had caused around 30,000 deaths since 1984; certainly, there was little sign of sympathy for the insurgent Kurds or for the cause of an autonomous Kurdistan. The fact was that, aside from the odd reference by those in my grandmother’s generation to les Turques, I had barely heard any talk of the ethnic majority as a group distinct from ourselves; and indeed my cousins, the first generation to have been educated at Turkish schools and to speak Turkish as a first language, would have found bizarre and hurtful the notion that they were not Turkish. What else could they be? No native Mersiner, as far as I was aware, thought of himself as Syrian or Lebanese; Aleppo and Beirut and Tripoli and Damascus simply did not figure as homelands in our communal imagination. Go back to Syria and Lebanon? And do what?
Wright’s report continued with an analysis of the ‘Turkish Attitude towards the Minorities’:
The Turk has an instinctive dislike and distrust of all minorities. If, unlike nearby Adana, Mersin has never been the scene of wholesale massacres, the reason is partly that Armenians, the chief victims of the various Adana massacres, have never been found in large numbers in Mersin, and partly that Mersin has never been a predominantly Turkish town. Syrian influence and sea traffic have played an important part in making Mersin a far more European town than, for instance, Adana.
The largest minority, the Alaouites, being poor and inconspicuous, are, though apt to be bullied, left pretty much alone by the Turkish authorities. The same applies to the Jews, Armenians and Greeks, though they are never allowed to forget that they are minorities.
The Syrians, both Moslem and Christian, but principally the latter, are the real focus of minority feeling in this district. They themselves, by their gregariousness and ostentatious behaviour, encourage rather than allay this animosity, and it is for their benefit that notices are permanently displayed in the Mersin Club insisting that ‘Those who know Turkish must speak it.’
The Syrians are, whether they like it or not, the mainstay of all charitable appeals and are expected to pay without demur whatever sum is demanded of them. It is their ‘voluntary contributions’ which will form the bulk of the fund being raised by the Vali for his Five Year Building Plan. They thus buy for themselves an ‘insecure security’, and so balance themselves on the edge of a volcano which they feel may erupt at any moment.
Bewildered by this portrait of a Mersin I didn’t recognize, I rang up my mother and asked her whether she knew of any law compelling the use of the Turkish language. She didn’t recall anything herself, she said, but there was a story about my grandmother’s friend Madame Dora, who was sent to prison for a month for snapping in Turkish at a barking dog, ‘Türkçi konus!’ (Speak Turkish!) ‘What about the Varlik Vergisi?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ my mothe
r said, ‘that was a big thing.’ It happened at the worst time, she said, when her father was away in Palestine. Mamie Dakad was saved by her Muslim friends, whose intervention ensured that the sum demanded, although still grossly excessive, was reduced.
I began to see my grandmother’s taxpaying trophies in a different light. ‘What about Armenian massacres in Adana?’ I asked. Denis Wright’s reference to these had prompted a tiny recollection of something my great-aunt Isabelle had once said to me, many years ago – something about the river in Adana running red with the blood of Armenians. My mother seemed unsure. ‘Well, there were incidents in Adana, a long time ago,’ she said vaguely. My mother hesitated. ‘I remember Mlle Victorine, a friend of the family who was maybe ten years older than my father, speaking about cries and shouts in the street outside her house. She lived in Adana. And I remember Madame Madeleine once saying that the Tahintzi family had a factory in Tarsus where Armenians hid. Nothing happened in Mersin, I don’t think. There weren’t many Armenians living there.’ She added, ‘There were quite a few Armenian girls at my school in Aleppo, including, now that I think of it, the nieces of the man you say was a German agent, Joseph Ayvazian. The Armenian girls spoke Turkish as a first language,’ my mother said.
I didn’t dwell on the subject of the Armenians; didn’t ask myself, for example, what had happened to the now non-existent Armenian settlement in Adana. What I thought about was contrast between the general unpleasantness of the Mersin that Wright described and the stories the Mersin people told of the golden, paradisal old days. Something didn’t add up.
I didn’t know it, but enlightenment was at hand. In the autumn, I caught a train to Paris to meet my second cousin, Olivier Dacade. Olivier, who works as a valuer of antiques and has a strong curatorial streak, had put into order the papers of his grandfather, Joseph Dakak’s brother Georges Dacade, and for some time I had been meaning to visit him. I had once or twice met the famously kind Oncle Georges, who died in 1991, but had not got to know him. I was aware that he’d left Mersin for France as a young man and eventually, in partnership with his brother-in-law René Salendre, built up a successful business as a wholesaler and retailer of cloth, garments and haberdashery. The most I was hoping for were some family photographs or letters.
So I was astonished, when I visited Olivier at his apartment near the Bastille, to find a photo of the Mersin waterfront in 1915 (how narrow and deserted and scruffy the main street looked!) and, more striking still, photographs of a hulking German warship anchored off the shore of the town, and of a row of cheerful German pilots looking handsome and glamorous in their flying jackets. There was a picture of a column of Sikh troops marching along a jetty, and another of British officers saluting the arrival of French soldiers. It dawned on me that my grandfather had grown into adulthood in a Mersin fundamentally different to any place I had known or drowsily imagined, a port teeming with German and French and British military and administrative personnel. Evidently, some of these foreigners rented rooms in the house of Caro Dakak: Olivier showed me pictures of my great-grandmother, a sturdily-built woman with dark eyebrows, happily posing for the camera with lodgers wearing French uniforms.
Perhaps the most intriguing document that Olivier possessed was the manuscript text of a speech delivered by his grandfather on 11 December 1919. Oncle Georges, a fifteen-year-old student at the Collège St Antoine, a humble school for boys in Mersin run by the Capuchin friars, had the honour of addressing the following words of welcome to General Gouraud, the commander-in-chief of France’s Levant Army:
My General,
The year was 1521. The Imperial forces had crossed the Ardennes and now threatened Mézières. Their bravery notwithstanding, the troops of François I were on the retreat, and the king’s advisers had decided to abandon the town, which seemed too weak to withstand a siege. It was then that Bayard exclaimed with heroic ardour, ‘There are no weak places where there are men with heart to defend them!’
My General, you speak with the same voice! You have uttered magnificent words in the course of this horrible war, and you have heroically made them good.
You set foot on our Cilician shore aureoled with glory won in so many battles. In you, we salute a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche [a fearless, faultness knight]; a hero who more than once, when disaster beckoned, led his armies with victorious deeds to the most brilliant success.
My General, all our admiration translates to a sole cry, a cry that travels beyond your glorious person to that distant land you have just left, to that nation that you have defended, which we, too, love with all our hearts:
Vive la France!
Allow us, finally, to express our confidence in you and, if it is not too bold for a mere schoolboy to tamper with historic words, we say to you, as Bayard did, ‘There are no weak places, no desolate regions, where there are brave people to defend and protect them.’
France, Joseph de Maistre said, is the land of astonishing resurrections. Once again, my General, you shall prove that saying true.
Thank you, and vive la France.
I was enough of a Turk for my first reaction to Oncle Georges’ speech to be one of shock. It was astounding that my great-uncle had cheered on the forces of occupation in this way and, indeed, that the schoolmasters who must have penned his words should have exposed a teenager to the possible consequences of siding with Turkey’s enemy in such a public and extreme way: because the comparison of General Gouraud to Chevalier Bayard amounted to an assertion that Mersin was no more Turkish than Mézières, a town in northeastern France. The notion was so extravagantly colonialist as to be comical; but any wry amusement on my part disappeared after I’d looked into the circumstances in which my great-uncle’s speech was made, and the historical spaces opened by his evocation of a battle four centuries past. Then I was simply appalled.
French interest in Cilicia dated back to the Crusaders, who enjoyed friendly relations with the local Armenian kingdom, an offshoot of Greater Armenia that finally collapsed in 1375. The French-Cilician connection was restored in 1536, when François I – and here one returned to Oncle Georges’ speech – acquired extraterritorial privileges, known as capitulations, in Ottoman lands which, since its conquest from the Egyptians in 1515, included Cilicia. French subjects enjoyed liberty of residence and movement, freedom of religion, substantial immunity from Ottoman jurisdiction in civil and criminal matters and, most importantly, freedom of commerce. Even though the rival powers enjoyed capitulations of their own, France became the dominant trading partner of the Ottoman Empire and French its language of business, communications and education: in 1907, my grandfather, a seven-year-old primary school student in Iskenderun, was one of around 70,000 Syrian children attending a French religious school.
By this time, France had long assumed the role of chief ‘protector’ of Christians in the Empire. The position of Ottoman Christians was, true enough, less than ideal. Although each religious community was substantially autonomous in matters of worship, law, marriage, healthcare and education, and in this sense enjoyed privileges not extended to religious minorities, notably Jews, by western States, non-Muslims suffered from economic and social disabilities and occasional violence. From the mid-nineteenth century, a culture arose, among the increasingly nationalistic Christian subjects of the Sultan, of judicial and political recourse to the foreign powers and their capitulatory jurisdictions. Predictably enough, this aggravated Turkish suspicions of Christian disloyalty, which exacerbated intercommunal hostilities, which, in completion of a self-perpetuating cycle, provided further grounds for western interventionism: most notoriously, in 1860 French troops occupied Syria in response to massacres of Syrian Christians. When I raised the subject in Mersin, nobody seemed to know about the massacres, even though they were extremely serious (25,000 Christians reportedly died in Damascus alone); had led to the creation of an autonomous Lebanon; and, it seemed to me, were possibly connected to their ancestors’ decision to migrate: it was in around 1
860, for example, that my grandmother’s grandfather and his brother decided to leave Syria for Mersin.
The next major French action on behalf of Ottoman Christians came in 1895, when, as a result of ‘atrocities’ committed against Armenians, France and other European powers forced Abdul Hamid II, the Red Sultan, to introduce reforms. However, the reforms only led to further killings of Armenians: reported figures for the number of dead fluctuated between a few thousand to 200,000. This was a very wide spectrum, and all I could feel sure of, after I’d hesitantly dipped into the historical literature, was that the precise fate of the slaughtered lay at the bottom of a cold and profound sea of misconceptions into which, if I took my research further, fresh errors of my own would trickle. I took refuge in this problem, and also in a concrete thought: there were no reports of Armenian casualties in Adana or anywhere else close to my grandfather’s world. This fortified my inclination to skip the Armenians, as if their history formed a disagreeable, non-vital college course. I was afraid, of course, of being sucked into the morass of the Armenian genocide, about which I only knew that it was hotly disputed, that it involved death-marches, and that it had taken place during the Great War. I couldn’t see what Joseph Dakak had to do with the fate of the Armenians, whom I had never connected to Mersin. (Didn’t the Armenians essentially come from north-east Turkey?) So I moved straight on to the next, most interesting, link between France and Turkey: the post-war French occupation of Cilicia, the name given by the occupiers to the boomerang of part-mountainous, part-fertile land comprising the eastern Taurus and the Amanus mountains and the maritime lowlands they enclosed.
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