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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  He shook his head and laughed. ‘To hell with old ruins! You go to the beach. Have a swim. Enjoy yourself!’

  I said I could think of few more enjoyable activities than looking for ruined hermitages. My hostess, however, looked concerned. ‘It is so, so far!’

  ‘It’s only about six kilometres.’

  ‘Six kilometres by car, maybe. By walking, much further.’

  Undeterred, I set off the following day along the promontory. Despite a rising tideline of apartment blocks, much of the landward end was covered, as IB noticed, with figs and vines. A road wound upwards but ended at a gate and a large sign that said MILITARY ZONE – ENTRY PROHIBITED. I about-turned, then struck out across country that clattered with dry thistles. Wind sang in power-lines overhead. Towards the end of the peninsula there was another military installation, set on the last high peak and containing several golf-ball radar domes. And there, tantalizingly far inside the perimeter fence, I spotted the ruins of an old building. For a moment I considered marching up to the gate, flourishing the Travels and trying to gain entry. Instinct told me this was the hermitage; prudence, however, and cowardice, prevented me from trying to find out. Instead, I climbed down to the end of Turkey, a sheer drop overhung with lichen-covered rocks, and ate chocolate biscuits.

  Once more the horizon had been air-brushed out by mist. For centuries, Arab geographers had had only the haziest notions of what lay beyond it. There were reports of an outlet at the north to the Circumambient Ocean, and of sea-monsters four days’ journey in length. In IB’s time, knowledge of the dim transpontine regions had improved. There was a steady traffic from them into the central Islamic lands, most importantly in slaves. The Mamluk aristocrats of Cairo – Sultan al-Nasir’s father Qalawun, Qawsun, Bashtak and most of their fellows – were shipped from the northern Black Sea ports. But the interior was little known.

  I wondered why IB had crossed to the steppe empire of the Golden Horde. He offered no clues. Fate had set his journey in motion, a growing love of travel had kept it moving; but what about the itinerary? From the Travels, one would imagine he existed in a purely accidental world: he was in Turkey, then he went to the Crimea. Reading between the lines, however, I suspect that two pieces of information were on his mind: that Özbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde, was a recent and keen convert to Islam; and that, his territories being vaster by far than those of all the princelings of Anatolia combined, he was rich.

  I walked back to Sinop along the lower slopes of the promontory. Cows munched at the scrub between unfinished shells of buildings. As I was passing an inhabited villa, a man watering the garden invited me for coffee. Vural spoke only Turkish and German but his daughter, Hale, was a fluent English-speaker. They had never heard of the hermitage, but knew much about the other monuments of Sinop. ‘The one that’s impressed me most’, I said, ‘is Pervane’s madrasah. Not just the building, but the fact that it’s still in use.’

  Vural caught the gist of this, and was wrinkling his nose even before Hale translated. When she did, he smiled darkly and muttered something about ‘arabische Mikroben’. To illustrate the point, he darted into the garage, came out with a can of flyspray and directed imaginary blasts towards the town. ‘Paff! … Paff!’

  It hardly needed an explanation; but Hale said, ‘What he means is that these places are dangerous. The boys will grow up and try to spread shari’ah, Islamic law.’ We talked on, I the infidel defending Islamic tradition and continuity, Vural the Muslim vehemently attacking these subversive institutions, until a sudden blast of wind off the sea set the power-lines shrieking. It was cold, a first breath of winter, ‘when the Land of al-Rum is like glittering glass, its air like stinging hornets’. Our looking-glass debate came to an end.

  I walked on briskly and stopped for an early supper at the Pasha Battery, a Crimean War fort that advertised itself as a restaurant and casino. In the empty dining-room, the waiter pressed champagne and whisky on me. I said I’d just have a beer. ‘And have one yourself,’ I offered, thinking that the place needed cheering up a bit.

  He smiled. ‘I don’t drink. You see, I’m at the İmam Hatip Lisesi. I’m going to be a mosque preacher, in sha Allah.’

  I told him that a casino seemed a strange choice of workplace for a future khatib. I certainly couldn’t imagine the Arabian microbes at the Pervane madrasah or my rafiq Yalçın, also at Islamic high school, plying people with hard liquor. The waiter merely shrugged. Perhaps there was no choice.

  At the far end of the restaurant there was a small stage with a two-manual electronic organ. Later, inspired by the beer, and since there was still no one else about, I asked the waiter if he would switch it on. ‘You play?’ he asked. I said I did.

  He also turned on some coloured lights and a revolving disco globe. And there I sat, in a vaulted Ottoman arsenal, playing Bach’s D minor Toccata to a pre-recorded boom-shagga-boom with the volume just this side of feedback. I was getting my own back on Pub 13.

  *

  ‘Our stay in Sinop lasted about forty days’, lB remembered, ‘while we were awaiting an occasion to travel by sea to the Crimea. We then hired a vessel belonging to the Greeks but remained eleven days more, waiting for a favourable wind.’ IB’s seven-week wait didn’t bode well. Down in the harbour there were a few smallish fishing vessels, but little activity except on the mole, where boys dangled lines into water thick with jellyfish.

  I asked around for boats to Kırım, the Crimea. The only response was the tongue-click and the languid raising of eyebrows which in Turkey denotes not surprise, but negation. At length I found a small elderly man, the owner of a fishing boat, who had a little English and a lot of wombat-coloured hair poking out between his shirt buttons. ‘Russian boats go Yalta,’ he told me. ‘Cucumbers, melons, fruits. But not now. Customs problems. Pay too much Kırım. Also economy problems.’ As he spoke, the hair wriggled fascinatingly. ‘Now Sinop local fishing only. Often no fish. No money no honey. Try Trabzon. Try Istanbul better.’

  I thanked the hirsute talking telegram, and decided to try Istanbul.

  *

  I began on the quay at Karaköy, in the marble halls of Turkish Maritime Lines. They ran an occasional service to Samsun, just east of Sinop, and a summer cruise to Smyrna, Alexandria, Messina and various other Mediterranean fleshpots, and looked alarmed at the mention of the Crimea.

  The streets behind the quay looked more promising. All the signs were in Cyrillic characters; import-export men wearing shades and mobile phones stood in the doorways of shops that sold chandeliers and surveillance devices. A black and chrome Chevrolet Impala cruised past, aglitter with fins.

  Between the quayside buildings I spotted a ship, the Doktor Ivan Popov, and wondered if this might be part of the ex-Soviet research fleet which, I had heard, now kept the Ukraine and points north supplied with fridge-freezers. But how to find out?

  I tried an agency which offered ‘БИΛETЬI something something CTAMБYΛ-OДECCA’. Inside, Mr Öner could offer me tickets not only to Odessa, but also to Novorossiysk. ‘And the Crimea?’ I asked, hopefully.

  ‘It is not now a regular destination,’ he said. ‘Try the Chamber of Shipping.’

  In which my inquiry was answered with a decisive yok.

  I was sitting there, wondering what to do next, when an English-speaking seaman came over and struck up a conversation. I told him all about IB; he gave me a look of profound sympathy. ‘Perhaps you go to the dock and sit,’ he suggested. ‘Wait for a ship from Kırım.’ I asked how long I might have to wait. ‘Maybe one week, maybe more …’

  I pictured myself camping out on the quayside among the fridge-freezers, growing seedier by the day and clutching a bit of card: YALTA (SEVASTOPOL WILL DO).

  ‘Your man Ibn was here very long ago,’ said the sailor. ‘Now you go to Atatürk International Airport and you fly.’

  This time I had absolutely no doubt about what IB would have done.

  IB sailed from Sinop across the Black Sea to the Crimea, pa
rt of the vast territories of the Tatar Golden Horde. After a visit to the ruler Özbeg Khan, whose tented capital was at the time in the northern foothills of the Caucasus, he set out for Constantinople. IB spent a month in the Byzantine capital then, probably in October 1332, turned east and headed once more for that elusive goal – India.

  The Crimea

  Fourteenth-century Features

  ‘I was come into a new world.’

  Friar William of Rubruck (13th century), on entering the land of the Golden Horde

  IT WASN’T THE age of the Crimean Air plane that was alarming, but the colour scheme. The walls and curtains, in two shades of blue – pleasing enough, rather Oxbridge – were teamed with a fudge-coloured carpet and blood-clot seats. Several of these collapsed under my fellow passengers. They were all Turks, all male and all very excitable, and the cabin was filled with whoops and cheers.

  Crimean Air, according to the boarding pass, was my reliable partner for journeys to Tashkent, Krasnodar, Minsk, Murmansk, Chelyabinsk – what a poetical boarding pass! – Novosibirsk, Windhoek … Windhoek? As my mind boggled at the idea of Crimeans in the Kalahari, an air hostess appeared through the cockpit door. She was wearing a retina-jangling red trouser-suit, and looked very strict. Chatter ceased, and she began reciting the safety procedure.

  As she spoke my eye fell on a large heap of ropes, nets and floats beside her at the front of the cabin. There seemed to be no explanation for their presence, unless they were some sort of primitive life-saving device in case of a forced landing in the Black Sea. I shuddered, remembering a description by a contemporary of IB of the Sea of Nitush (early on in the history of Arab geography, a copyist had got the dots wrong on Pontus, the classical name for the Black Sea – he wrote at that moment the wind must have changed, for Nitush it remained): ‘it is a dark and frightful sea, stormy and great of wave, seething furiously, a swift wrecker of ships, and frequented by waterspouts.’ Even if we escaped drowning, bobbing in our net like the Jumblies in their sieve, there was another horror, perhaps worse: the notorious Pontine sea-fart, an enormous submarine stink-bomb said periodically to explode in the Black Sea’s lower depths, bubbling up and gassing anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.

  IB himself had a bad experience on the Black Sea. ‘A storm blew up against us. We were in sore straits, with destruction staring us in the face. I was in the cabin, along with a man from the Maghrib named Abu Bakr, and I bade him go up on deck to observe the state of the sea. He did so and returned, saying, “I commend you to God”.’ It didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

  The air hostess finished speaking and, with perfect timing, a voice from the back of the plane exclaimed the Turkish equivalent of ‘I commend you to God’. There was a ripple of laughter, followed by a nervous silence as the plane taxied. Within a few minutes, however, we were climbing over the northern mouth of the Bosphorus, out over an innocent, blue Black Sea.

  My neighbour opened his briefcase, took out a publication called Mega-Pasha, and was soon engrossed in an illustrated feature showing odalisques in bridal veils and knickers. I opened the Travels.

  IB survived the storm and landed at the eastern end of the Crimea. ‘This wilderness’, he wrote, describing the steppe, ‘is green and grassy, with neither tree nor hill, high or low, nor narrow pass nor firewood. What they use for burning is animal dung, and you can see even their men of rank gathering it up and putting it in the skirts of their robes.’ Mandeville also mentioned the Tatars’ manure-mania: ‘They eat Cattes, and all maner of wyld bestes, rattes & myce, and they have but lyttle wodde, and therefore they dyght theyr meate with horse dounge & other bestes dounge … and they be ryght foule folke, and of evyll lyking.’

  IB’s opinion of the Tatars was higher. Although their customs were scarcely less strange to a Tangerine than to an inhabitant of Hertfordshire, they were at least ruled over by an enthusiastic convert to Islam – Özbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde and in-law to both the Mamluk Sultan and the Byzantine Emperor. The traveller was to meet him later, in the foothills of the Caucasus; for the moment his goal was Tuluktumur, Özbeg’s governor of the Crimea, who held court in its cognate capital of al-Qiram. My intention was to look for traces of IB’s Tatars, but I was also keen to meet their modern-day descendants: expelled from the Crimea by Stalin in 1944 for ‘collaboration’ with the Germans, 250,000 Crimean Tatars had returned home after the break-up of the Soviet Union – albeit to a frosty reception from the Russian and Ukrainian majority.

  Among my other Battutian destinations was Kaffa, ‘one of the world’s celebrated ports’, renamed Feodosia when Catherine the Great took the Crimea from its last ruling khan. When IB was there, Kaffa was a trading enclave under a Genoese governor and populated by Genoese, Venetians, Florentines, Turks, Russians, Egyptians, Greeks, Circassians, Armenians, Alans and Provençals. It was his first experience of a mainly Christian town, and it was a shock. One aspect of Feodosia particularly fascinated me: it was supposedly the place from which the Black Death spread to Europe, the Levant and North Africa. Most important of all, I wanted to investigate one of IB’s strangest overnights – in a church in eastern Crimea, where he and a monk talked icons.

  As I walked out of the arrivals hall at the airport of Simferopol, the present Crimean capital, all these plans began to crumble. I was ridiculously ill-prepared. All I had to guide me was a slim Russian phrasebook, the Travels, various jottings from Arab geographers – none later than the fourteenth century – and the name of a hotel eighty miles away in Feodosia. I asked the Turks if they knew how to get there. They were surprised. ‘Feodosia? Keffe? It’s not good. Come with us to Simferopol.’ They described some of the capital’s temptations, mercantile and fleshly. I was not tempted. The Turks boarded a bus and I was left alone, delighted by their use of the pre-Catherinian name but wondering if I would ever make it to Feodosia – let alone Kaffa.

  A large and grizzled taxi driver sauntered up to me and spoke in Russian. ‘Feodosia …?’ I inquired, tremulously. He smiled, and beckoned. A replay of scenes during my last days in Turkey flashed through my mind: faces aghast at the mention of the Crimea, fingers drawn across throats, a warning heard in Kastamonu – ‘Never, never go out at night in Kırım. They eat people.’ The afternoon was waning. I followed the taxi driver, wondering whether I would end up dyghted with dung somewhere out in the huge silence of the steppe.

  Vitaly was, of course, charming. We were soon discussing – God knows how – the merits of various bars in Aden, which he had visited as a sailor in 1972. The Crescent, I agreed, was decidedly horrorshow – my Burgessian approximation to the Russian for ‘good’. We recalled too the Rock, and the Sailor’s Club; but conversation – like the bars of old Aden – soon ran dry. Vitaly put on a cassette of bitter-sweet Slavic disco music.

  The road was fast but potholed. We headed east through colourless steppe under a vast sky, smooth and grey as a flat-iron. At first it looked as if it would never quite meet the earth; but soon a horizon appeared to the south – a line of mountains behind which, Vitaly said, lay the sea. The Crimea took on shape: that of a prodigious pasty, rolled flat in the middle, crimped at the edge.

  There were occasional villages of small cement-block houses, and people with vegetables in buckets by the side of the road. Some sold honey, one of the Crimea’s medieval exports. Amid the strangeness of arrival, it was something to latch on to. Then, abruptly, we entered a region of deciduous forest. In Turkey, autumn had been at its melancholy outset; here it was crimson and yellow, fierce and fiery. I had crossed from the land of a mousy Pan to the realm of red-headed and more primitive gods. As we drove past Stary Krim, IB’s city of al-Qiram, I noticed a brand-new mosque near the road. Further into the town rose another minaret. Its profile took me back across the sea, across Anatolia, and I realized that it must belong to the mosque built by Özbeg in 1314 – within a year or two of the one put up by Sultan Muhammad ibn Aydın of Birgi. Something else to latch on to. ‘Allah! Allah!’ V
italy wailed. ‘Krimsky Tatar … mullah!’

  It was still not dark when we reached Feodosia. I had forgotten how far north we were – as far north as Bordeaux. I shivered; but boys and girls wandered about in the endless twilight in shorts, displaying endless, non-Tatar legs. For the next half-hour we cruised the town, asking in vain for my hotel. This was not a simple matter. When I had booked the room (a requirement for getting a visa) through an agent in Manchester, it had been called the Torgtehbiznes; I had recently telephoned the agent from Turkey to change my dates, and learned that it was now called the Fiord. When, finally, we found it, there was no indication on the blank frontage that it was a hotel at all, and certainly no name. Even the staff didn’t seem to know what it was called. Incredibly, though, they were expecting me.

  I behaved like a newly arrived Martian. They had to show me how to use the room-key, double-headed like Zeus’s axe, and how to switch on the light. I then locked myself in the loo and had to be rescued. As I was searching for an appropriate form of thanks in the phrasebook, one of the other guests gently closed it, said, ‘No! This…’ and flourished a bottle of vodka.

  He was right. Vodka – and Crimean champanskaya, and konyak, and scotch from me – were great facilitators of communication. An impromptu party began. We ate curds with sour cream and sugar, and the little dumplings called pelmeni, and oily shprotti – which my new vodka-based fluency told me were Slavonic ‘sprats’. Despite these stomach-lining snacks, the drink took me by stealth. Sprats, shprats, shprotts: it seemed eminently reasonable.

  And then it happened, quite unexpectedly: I was dancing. My partner was a plump platinum blonde, comfortably into her fifties, less so into a lamé sheath dress. As we swayed in a tight clinch – an unusual tactile experience, both metallic and pneumatic – she ruffled my hair, pointed to herself and cooed, ‘Babushka!’ Then, pointing to me she added, throatily, ‘I loahv you!’