Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  ‘If I could be Sultan of Birgi,’ Yalçın day-dreamed, ‘do you know where I would build my palace? Right here, in this tea-garden.’ He was probably right. We had combed Birgi and found no better site. He had also asked everyone we met whether they knew about the göktaşı, the skystone. Although we had drawn a blank, I could not have wanted a more dogged research assistant. ‘Is it very important for you to find it?’ he asked.

  It was the sort of question, like those concerning the song the sirens sang or the Sphinx’s inscrutable smile, that one ought to ask but didn’t. ‘Well … I suppose it’s important to look.’

  ‘Then I shall dig for it!’ he said, with a sudden heroic gesture that took in Birgi, Bozdağ and half the Little Meander valley. ‘But first,’ he continued, back to his serious self, ‘we must look for the campsite.’

  *

  When IB arrived in Birgi, ‘the Sultan was passing the summer on a mountain thereabouts on account of the great heat. We climbed up to the mountain by a road that had been hewn in its side, and reached his camp just before noon. There we alighted, by a stream of water shaded by walnut trees.’

  ‘There is IB’s road,’ Yalçın said, pointing to a track terraced into the flank of the mountain. It was the following morning, and we were looking up at the massif of Bozdağ squatting over the town on its great sunburnt hunkers.

  IB was not a happy camper; he soon grew restless in Sultan Muhammad’s summer retreat. Still, he carefully described his accommodation, ‘a tent which is called by them a kharqah, made of wooden laths put together in the form of a cupola and covered with pieces of felt; the upper part can be opened to admit light and air’. The design is old enough to have appeared in Aeschylus, whose Scythians ‘dwell in latticed huts high-poised on easy wheels’ – a reference to the mobile version of the yurt that IB saw later in the land of the Golden Horde. Formerly this mini geodesic dome was found from Anatolia to Manchuria. Now, although the Turks themselves have abandoned these round tents, they still survive elsewhere in Asia (and have even recently crossed the Bering Strait to Oregon where, as New Age housing, the tepee is passé).

  We set off up the track. Below us an early sun raked across the roofs, minarets and gardens of Birgi; further below, a haze hung over the Little Meander. We climbed quickly into the cooling air, browsing on wild figs and green walnuts. Eventually the old road merged with a new asphalted one. Yalçın flagged down a tractor and we bounced the rest of the way up, sitting in a scoop at the back. ‘It’s not cheating,’ he pointed out. ‘IB was riding a horse.’

  I was surprised to find Bozdağ a substantial settlement of concrete houses and tea-gardens. ‘The rich people in Birgi and Ödemiş come here for the summer,’ Yalçĭn explained, ‘just like the Sultan. Only they have villas now, not tents.’ IB, the unhappy camper, would have approved.

  After lunch we set out along a stream, looking for a campsite shaded by walnut trees. Yalçın led the way, slashing through the undergrowth with his stick. Often we were forced to walk in the stream itself. ‘This is Vietnam!’ he said. ‘Like the American films. Write in your notebook, “And Yalçın led me into water many metres deep, and we swam it bravely!”’ I did, although the stream was no more than a trickle. Several hours later, stung by nettles and covered with old man’s beard, we gave up. We hadn’t found the place; or perhaps we had found it many times, for the entire valley was overhung with walnuts, old ones, perhaps even Battutian ones.

  We sat under one of them and went through the text again; but there were no more clues. ‘We have looked,’ said Yalçın, ‘and maybe we have found. We shall never know. But I think that if everything was written in the book, there would be no reason to come and look.’

  I caught the last bus out of Birgi, the only passenger. The driver asked me if I had found my göktaşı, my skystone. I shook my head, and looked back at Birgi: the last of the light was catching Sultan Muhammad’s minaret; Bozdağ was growing indistinct, a little furry, like moleskin. What I had found, and left behind, was my rafiq.

  *

  I have said that there are no ghosts in Islam; perhaps it would be more correct to say that there are no Muslim ghosts. ‘The story goes’, wrote the traveller Abu Hamid of Granada,

  that in the time of the Prophet, Abdullah ibn Umar went on a journey. He set out alone on his she-camel. As he was passing the battle-site of Badr where the pagans of Mecca were killed, the ground suddenly split open. ‘There rose up’, he said, ‘a human being, blackened and smouldering from head to toe. He had a chain about his neck that dragged behind him, and he cried out to me, “Abdullah! Give me water! Give me water!” My camel shied at the apparition. Then there rose up another man. He pulled the first one back towards him with the chain, saying, “Do not give him water, for this is Abu Jahl, the enemy of God!” Then he drove Abu Jahl back into his grave with a whip, and the ground closed over him.’ Abdullah ibn Umar was terrified, and abandoned his journey. When he told the Prophet of what he had witnessed, the Prophet made it a rule that thereafter no one should ever travel alone. He said, God’s blessings and peace on him, ‘One’s company for the devil, two for a pair of devils; three’s company for travelling.’

  IB took the decree to heart. As well as al-Tuzari, his Tunisian rafiq, he had gathered along the way a group of even shadowier, nameless ‘companions’. In Ephesus he bought ‘a Greek slave-girl, a virgin, for forty gold dinars’; in Smyrna Ghazi Umar, son of the Sultan of Birgi, gave him a slave named Nicholas, ‘five spans tall’; shortly after this in Balikesir he bought another slave, Margarita. All these were in addition to the slave Michael, part of a going-away present from Sultan Muhammad that also included a hundred gold dinars, a thousand silver dirhams, a complete wardrobe and a horse. The companions had to make do with a robe each and some dirhams.

  IB was no longer the callow spiritual backpacker who had left Tangier six years earlier. He was turning into a swell, and getting – at least in retrospect in the Travels – increasingly blasé about Turkoman princes: that of Gerede was ‘one of the middling class of sultans … of fine character, but not liberal’ (he gave IB a horse and a robe), his counterpart of Balikesir (gift rating: a silk robe) ‘a worthless person’ who ruled over ‘a rabble of good-for-nothings for, as they say, “Like king like people”’.

  Although most of the names in IB’s good sultans guide have slipped out of the historical conscious, there are exceptions. Sarukhan of Manisa (no gift rating, as he was busy paying his respects to the air-dried corpse of a recently deceased son) has a hotel named after him, and a park. He even has a statue, thickly moustached, turbaned and wearing a sort of trench-coat. Apart from the turban, the statue bears a striking resemblance to Earl Haig. And then there was Orkhan (‘he sent me a large sum of money’), son of Othman the eponymous Ottoman.

  In Orkhan, IB sensed the enormous energy that galvanized an empire and a six-hundred-year dynasty: ‘It is said that he has never stayed for a whole month in any one town. He fights with the infidels continually and keeps them under siege.’ Faced with such boundless machismo there was little the infidels, the Byzantines, could do. They had entered the long, couch-potato period of their decline, and left the business of war to Catalan mercenaries who were less interested in fighting the Turk than in plundering the cities they were paid to defend. Orkhan had taken the city of Bursa in north-west Anatolia only five years before IB’s visit; by the time of his death twenty-eight years later, his armies were thumping on the gates of the Balkans.

  I once met a descendant of Orkhan’s who lived in Henley-on-Thames and worked as a chartered accountant. Now, I had higher hopes of Battutian resonances from his illustrious ancestors, still in their old capital of Bursa. I was disappointed. Both Orkhan’s and Othman’s mausolea had been rebuilt after an earthquake in 1855 in Great Exhibition-orientalist taste, all mother-of-pearl, pastel shades and chandeliers. Orkhan’s funerary turban was wrapped in cellophane, like an outsized toffee-apple.

  There was something trumpery, almost fli
ppant about these tombs. The rest of Bursa, however, seemed weighed down by its own gravitas, and was predominantly brown. The Great Mosque, a fine fourteenth-century building, had been painted with trompe-l’oeil drapes in several shades of brown; a nearby civic building was encased in dark brown wood, like a Bavarian Rathaus. The leaves were turning brown, and the city smelt of autumn, rich pastries and dead empires. My mind kept returning to that airy shortbread mosque in Birgi, built by a man who preferred camping on Bozdağ to campaigning against Byzantium. I left Bursa to its brown study and headed for the Black Sea.

  By now, IB too had stopped divagating, and was set on the port of Sinop and a passage to the Crimea. Sultans were thinner on the ground in northern Anatolia, and here the Travels has more to say on the sort of people who, without mausolea, would otherwise have sunk into the anonymous mulch of dead humanity. There is the doctor of Islamic law, famed locally for his knowledge of Arabic, who turned out not to know a word of the language: ‘These travellers’, he squirmed, in Persian, ‘speak the ancient Arabic speech and I know only the new Arabic.’ There is IB’s Christian landlady in Göynük, who tried to sell him a job-lot of saffron; and the servant sent to the market for Arabic samn, clarified butter, who came back with Turkish semen, animal fodder. And there is that timeless character of travelogues, the rip-off merchant: ‘He used to steal some of the money for our expenses,’ IB remembered of his Arabic-speaking guide on the road to Kastamonu. ‘We had to put up with him because of our problem of not knowing Turkish, and it got to the stage where we would openly accuse him and say to him at the end of each day, “Well, Hajji, how much have you stolen from the kitty today?” He would tell us, and we would laugh at him and make the best of it.’

  I made my way to Kastamonu in the company of peasants, on buses scented with garlic, damp wool and woodsmoke. Over the past months I had met enough dead medieval notables to last several lifetimes; but in Kastamonu I was keen to find another one, the aged and pious shaykh Dada Amir Ali. ‘I found him lying on his back,’ wrote IB. ‘One of his servants helped him to sit up, and another raised the eyelids from his eyes. On seeing me the shaykh addressed me in pure Arabic, saying, “You are heartily welcome!” I asked him his age and he said, “I was an associate of Caliph al-Mustansir, and at his death I was thirty years old. My age now is one hundred and sixty-three years.” I asked him to invoke a blessing on me; he did so, and I withdrew.’ (Gibb points out that the shaykh’s arithmetic was shaky: he could have been no more than 123 lunar years old – a mere 119 solar years.)

  Since Kastamonu billed itself as ‘an interest point of religious tourism’, and Dada Amir Ali sounded a likely candidate for sainthood, I spent a day religiously rambling around the town in search of his tomb. The expedition turned up several other Dadas, or ‘Grandads’, including one under an apple tree in an old lady’s back garden. I didn’t find my Dada; but I came across another curiosity called Aşıklı Sultan, a Seljuk killed in an attack on Byzantine Kastamonu in 1116. One end of this holy warrior’s grave was provided with a small window: poking out beneath the glass was a pair of small, mummy-like feet. I was immediately reminded of the similar, and roughly contemporary, ‘crusader’ in the vault of St Michan’s church in Dublin. Having – as one does – once shaken the crusader’s hand, I was now tempted to tickle Aşıklı Sultan’s toes. There was something irresistible about them: they looked like strips of biltong. The glass panel was, however, firmly fixed.

  *

  ‘You know Diogen?’ asked the manageress of the Villa Rose. ‘He lived here, in Sinop. This Diogen, one day one big colonel came to him. And Diogen says, “Hey, you get away. I want the shine!”’

  The story of the meeting between the colonel – in fact Alexander the Great – and Diogenes, the Cynic of Sinop, was followed by others, less well known. I learned that the city’s original inhabitants were Amazons and that Bilal, a local saint whose tomb IB visited, used to walk about with his head under his arm. The Villa Rose suited such rococo history: it was an ordinary seaside bungalow that had mutated, sprouting Corinthian columns, Louis Farouk fauteuils and aspidistras. A clock made from a gilded lobster hung on the dining-room wall, and next to my table stood a statue of a nude girl frotting her backside against a herm.

  Diogenes was, of course, a celebrated al fresco masturbator, and something of this tendency to public relaxation survived in Sinop until IB’s time. ‘I passed one day by the gate of the congregational mosque,’ he recalled, ‘outside which are stone benches where the inhabitants sit. I saw here several high-ranking officers, with an orderly in front of them holding a bag filled with a substance resembling henna. As I watched, one of the officers took a spoonful of it and ate it. I had no idea what it was, but the person with me told me it was hashish.’ Hash-fiends apart, IB thought well of Sinop, ‘a superb city which combines fortification with beautification’. I had arrived after sunset so could not yet assess its beauty; but even in the dark I could see the silhouettes of battlements. To the east, the towers of Trebizond have gone; the towers of Sinop survive, looming even over its bus station.

  In the morning I drew the curtains for my first sight of the sea: it was invisible beneath a mist. During breakfast, the mist lifted to reveal grey fishing boats on grey water beneath grey air – the Black Sea, grey on grey like a Monet Thames. As IB observed, Sinop stands at the landward end of a peninsula, ‘a mountain projecting into the sea’. I walked to the isthmus and explored the defences, walls and towers of rusticated masonry where lizards darted across the stones. Although a road had been punched through the wall that cut off the narrowest part of the isthmus, the vaulted gate where IB awaited permission to enter the city was still intact. Inside, however, it had become a café, with pink velvet tablecloths scarred with a pox of fagburns. Down by the harbour the Sea-gate, still a gate, echoed to an Iron Maiden track played at full volume from an adjoining tower; the site of IB’s lodgings, a hospice of the Akhis outside the gate, had become a ‘Family Tea-Garden’.

  Beside the door of the Great Mosque I was pleased to find the stone benches where IB had watched his Sinopean dope-heads, now much worn down by centuries of bottoms. Inside, though, the building had altered. According to the Travels Sulayman Pervane, the old ruler of Sinop, had always said his prayers on top of a marble cupola over the ablution fountain; this, however, had been replaced with a workaday wooden canopy. Neither had the prayer-hall been improved by a cladding of blue clapboard. I muttered, on IB’s behalf, about change and decay.

  Not far from the mosque, I spotted a portal surmounted by a sort of cinquelobate doily, all done in marble. An inscription identified the building as a college founded by IB’s Pervane. Expecting to find it recycled as another boutique mini-complex, I tried the door. It was locked. Clearly very exclusive … perhaps a salon de couture, or a recording studio? I rapped loudly. The door was opened by a boy with a grave expression; beyond him I saw a spacious colonnaded quadrangle with a marble fountain in the centre. The boy, I noticed, was holding an Arabic copybook. ‘Al-salam alaykum,’ I said.

  ‘Wa alaykum al-salam wa rahmat Allah wa barakatuh,’ he replied.

  How much he understood of my introduction to IB I don’t know; but I passed the entrance exam. Inside, seven other boys emerged from rooms around the court. We began a solemn progress through what I soon realized to be that great rarity – a functioning medieval madrasah. Eight bunk beds occupied one room, eight bars of soap were positioned at regular intervals around the fountain. Here, protected from Iron Maiden and other excesses, the boys had their characters formed by cold water and Qur’an lessons. IB would have been delighted.

  The tour ended beyond a door in the corner of the court, in a space roofed with corrugated iron. In contrast to the rigorous tidiness of the rest of the madrasah, it was littered with junk. Several lambs’ feet and a desiccated oesophagus had been chucked on a finely inscribed tomb. Wondering whom this might contain, I began to read the inscription: ‘This is the tomb of Ghazi … ibn Mas’ud Çel
ebi …’

  It was an unexpected discovery. Ghazi Çelebi, son of Mas’ud II, the last Seljuk Sultan of Rum, is probably the fourteenth century’s only documented frogman. ‘He was brave and audacious,’ IB reported, ‘and endowed by God with a special gift of endurance under water.’ The Ghazi used this gift to deadly effect, diving beneath Byzantine vessels and holing them with a drill. Neither my Turkish nor the boys’ Arabic was up to testing IB’s information, so I drew a sketch of the scene. They were totally mystified. The other part of the account, I decided, would be even further beyond my powers as an illustrator. According to IB, Ghazi Çelebi, in true Sinopean style, died stoned. Having one day eaten more hashish than was good for him, ‘he went out hunting and pursued a gazelle. But he spurred his horse on too hard and was intercepted by a tree, which struck and crushed his head. So he died.’ I recited a prayer for the soul of this remarkable man, and bade farewell to my puzzled hosts.

  The memory of my failed attempt at long-distance sea travel in Oman was still fresh, and I put off the business of looking for a boat to the Crimea with one last bit of inverse archaeology. ‘On top of the peninsula’, said IB, ‘is a hermitage dedicated to al-Khadir and Ilyas. Beside it is a spring of water, and a prayer made there is answered.’ (Strictly, al-Khadir and Ilyas – Elijah – are not a double act but two faces given to the same indistinct character; if this were not enough, Arab Christians also identify al-Khadir-Elijah with St George.) Al-Khadir has a way of popping up at geographical extremes – deserts, high peaks, IB’s own Tangier at the end of Africa – and Sinop, at the most northerly point of Asia Minor, is no exception. For years the Americans snooped across the Black Sea from a radar base out on the headland, and by chance a Turkish ex-employee came to tea at the Villa Rose. I asked him if he knew of the hermitage.