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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  Some time later I prised myself free, but she carried on dancing with increased vigour. I had several stiff shots of vodka to recover. The room began performing elaborate double entrechats. I excused myself for the night. But she was still up there strutting her stuff, pogoing alone to the bitter-sweet Slavic disco beat. Some babushka.

  I awoke early to the sound of leaves being swept on the street. My head, too, was littered with dead matter. I went for a walk to clear it. In the middle of town I found a market, already busy with headscarved women selling fruit and vegetables, almonds and walnuts, berries and dried camomile. Seeing this, I could understand the appeal of the Crimea for the Tatars. It had everything – bountiful forests and mountains and, inland, broad flat grazing for the herds. For a nomad people who were getting a taste for the fruits of settled life, it was perfection in miniature.

  The market was a thoroughly peasant place, but nearby was a different Feodosia, of low stuccoed villas with classical pediments, peeling madder washes and cats in windows. I stopped and listened: someone was playing the ‘Minute Waltz’ on a slightly out-of-tune piano, beautifully, rubato. It ended with a whirl of accelerando, then a silence broken only by the spin of falling leaves.

  I wandered down to the docks, IB’s ‘wonderful harbour where some two hundred ships lay, both ships of war and merchantmen’ – now silent too, home to a bare half-dozen small vessels. It was going to be hard to find out where hushed, provincial Feodosia and noisy, cosmopolitan Kaffa intersected, if indeed they still did.

  Back in the hotel a woman was waiting for me. She was in chic early middle age and wore a frock with red polka dots. She extended her hand. ‘My name is Nina Suvorova. The proprietress of this hotel summoned me.’ Her English was carefully poised. ‘She thought that you were perhaps a little … lost, and that you might welcome some guidance.’ She looked at me quizzically and pursed her lips, which matched the polka dots.

  ‘Well, I must say I’m a bit perplexed on the language front,’ I admitted. ‘By the way, your English is excellent.’

  ‘That is because I am a teacher of the English language,’ she explained.

  I told her that I too had been one, years ago. ‘Ah, then perhaps you know Bonk? But no, of course not. His grammar is for the Russian-speaking learner. It is indispensable. I always say to my students, “Let us begin with Bonk!”’ She smiled so radiantly that I could imagine no more delightful guide.

  We set out immediately. Nina hadn’t heard of IB; but I soon realized that, as far as more recent history went, I had no need of a guidebook. ‘This’, she said, pointing to a seafront façade covered with gambolling cherubs, ‘is the Astoria Hotel. It was constructed in 1914. You may wish to note that seven years later it was the scene of the conference that ended the Civil War. The last of the White Russians departed from here, from Feodosia.’ A statue of Pushkin, freshly decorated with flowers, inspired her to recite a verse; Lenin we passed by without comment. We strolled along the harbour, further than I had been on my earlier sortie, until we came to a tapering tower. ‘And this is the Tower of St Constantine. The noted nineteenth-century marine painter Aivazovsky, who was a great benefactor to Feodosia, recalled very scenically the arrival of Catherine the Great at this tower, after the capture of the Crimea by Potemkin from the hand of the last Tatar khan. The date of the khan’s surrender, if you would like to note it, was 8 April 1783. It was Catherine who restored to our city its original Greek name of Feodosia …’

  I was staring up at the building, following its cornicing of brick merlons, only half listening. Nina paused. ‘And the date of the tower?’

  ‘It was constructed by the Genoese in the fourteenth century …’ I felt a tingle of excitement ‘… The tower – I think one says more precisely “bastion” – was part of the city wall. Here the wall turned inland from the sea, protecting the Genoese from attackers from the steppe to the east.’ So this was the intersection, where Feodosia met Kaffa.

  We sat on a bench in a park behind the bastion. Nina was back to Aivazovsky; but my mind was elsewhere, trying to reconstruct the dreadful event which had taken place – right here – a decade and a half after IB’s visit.

  The year was 1346. Özbeg Khan had been dead five years; the new ruler of the Golden Horde was his son Janibeg, whom IB had met on his trip to the Caucasus foothills. The uneasy co-existence of Tatars and European traders had broken down. Janibeg’s forces first attacked the Genoese colony of Azov, on the mainland 250 miles to the north-east; now they were besieging Kaffa, and making little impression on it. Then disaster struck: the attackers were themselves attacked – by the Black Death. The siege collapsed, the European colony was safe. As a parting shot, Janibeg ordered his catapulteers to lob the bodies of the plague victims over the walls.

  Walls which had withstood live Tatars were no defence against dead ones. A city under siege, enclosed, tightly packed, is the human equivalent of a Petri dish: even before the Tatars had left, the plague was galloping through Kaffa. Fearing another siege, many of the surviving Italian merchants sailed for home. With them went Pasteurella pestis, released from the thinly populated steppe into the crowded Mediterranean basin, to gorge itself on Europe, North Africa and the Levant.

  Some commentators have branded the account, written by a contemporary Italian chronicler, a legend; others have pointed out that the epidemic would have spread in any case. The pest investigators Dols and Ziegler, however, do not doubt that the siege of Kaffa was a factor in the westward journey of the Black Death. And if the account is true in detail, then Janibeg was by no means the first commander to use biological weapons. In medieval Europe, besieged towns were regularly bombarded with dead cows, the victims of rinderpest. The idea is much older: according to Arab geographers the notorious scorpions of Nusaybin, now on the Turkish-Syrian border, are said to be descended from ancestors which the Sassanian army shot over the battlements in earthen pots in AD 363.

  As Nina dilated on painters and poets, my thoughts flicked between the procession to the Mosque of the Footprints in Damascus, plague pits in Bristol, and the sickening whump of corpses landing here, where we sat on a bench in a tree-lined avenue.

  ‘… And now we shall visit the burial place of Aivazovsky. I hope you are not tiring.’

  ‘No, no. I was just thinking of IB.’

  ‘Ah, Battutah. I believe you are thinking often about your Battutah.’ She made him sound like a rival for her affection.

  Unexpectedly, the burial place of Aivazovsky also rang Battutian bells – loud ones, and not only metaphorical. It was in a fourteenth-century Armenian church, approached through an arched structure like a porte-cochère. Nina explained that this was a bell-chamber. I immediately pulled out the Travels and read: ‘When we alighted at the mosque of Kaffa we heard the sounds of bells on every side. Never having heard them before, I was alarmed and bade my companions ascend the minaret and chant the Qur’an, litanies, and the call to prayer.’ The judge of the Muslims appeared, equally alarmed. ‘“I heard the chanting and the call to prayer, and feared for your safety,” he said. Then he went away, but no evil befell us.’

  ‘Your Battutah was correct when he said that the bells were all around him,’ Nina said, impressed. ‘There were approximately forty churches in medieval Kaffa.’

  As we wandered around the old part of the town we found more of them. One had a small tree growing out of its roof. Another lay in waste ground littered with human turds. Now they were silent; but it needed little imagination to picture the arrival of IB and his friends in what, to them, was a hell of bells. The sound is anathema to pious Muslims for, as the hadith says, ‘The angels will not enter any house in which bells are rung.’ In towns with mixed Muslim and Christian populations there could be long-running rivalries, Minarets v. Steeples. The eleventh-century poet al-Ma’arri described one such local derby:

  In Ladhiqiyyah it’s all go

  For Jesus and the Prophet:

  Priest’s bell clangs out fortissimo,
/>   Shaykh shrieks and strains to top it.

  There was one mosque in Feodosia, and it turned out to be no distance from the first church. As we entered the gate – Nina, I noticed, hesitantly – I wondered if this could have been the very place where IB staged his minaret protest, and where he and his companions stayed during their visit. The building, however, was hard to date, for it was a confused jumble of ragged masonry and brickwork, much patched and altered. The confusion was increasing as we watched: a man was mixing cement for a half-built arcade along the front of the prayer-hall. Hearing our footsteps, he turned around.

  For a moment, I stared. He had an almost circular face, rather flat, framed by a bobble hat and a wispy beard. His eyes were slightly feline, and set wide apart and high up in the skull. It was a strange face; and yet I had seen it many times before – in manuscripts, in silver and gold on bronze, in lustre on ceramics. It was the face of the steppe peoples, of Mamluks, Khans and Ilkhans – a young face, in its mid-twenties, but also a fourteenth-century face. ‘Al-salam alaykum,’ I said.

  ‘Wa alaykum’, he replied, equally surprised, but in good Arabic – I could tell from that much, ‘al-salam.’

  ‘Where did you learn Arabic?’ we asked each other, simultaneously, and then both laughed. I told him, and explained what had brought me to the Crimea. The imam of the Mufti Mosque had learned his Arabic, he said, in Tataristan. Nina watched us silently. She was in Feodosia, the imam and I in Kaffa.

  Inside the prayer-hall, he sketched in the mosque’s history. It was founded in 1623; a century and a half later, Potemkin gave it to the Catholics among his forces who had settled here, to use as a church. Only with the return of the Tatars in the 1990s had it become a mosque once more. ‘And now we are expanding,’ he said, indicating a growing island of carpet on the bare floor. Suddenly he glanced at his watch. ‘You must excuse me. I have to call the adhan. You see, we have no muezzin.’ I wanted to ask him more, but God came first. After all, He had been kept waiting long enough: there were two centuries of devotions to be made up for. ‘You will join us for the prayer?’ he asked me, expectantly.

  ‘I’m a Masihi,’ I replied.

  His face fell very slightly, like a soufflé taken from the oven, then reinflated. ‘It … it is good to speak Arabic. I hope you will return.’

  Outside, I paused at the street gate and looked back towards the bitty stonework of the prayer-hall. If this was three hundred years too late, what had happened to IB’s mosque? Then, something caught my eye, in the arch above the doorway: the stones were joggled – jointed together with a slight jigsaw kink. For a building of 1623, it was a very fourteenth-century feature … Perhaps I was becoming obsessive, seeing fourteenth-century profiles everywhere. The call to prayer sounded out, amplified, astonishingly loud in the bell-less hush of Feodosia.

  After our visit to the mosque Nina was, for once, subdued. She was back on form though when I went that evening to supper in her flat, in a block in the suburbs of Feodosia. At the door I was greeted by the earthy smell of bortsch and by Marco Polo – Nina’s terrier. He sniffed at my trousers; I sniffed at his name.

  Nina was giving a private class to a student (I noticed the indispensable Bonk between them on the table). While she took him, macaronically in English and Russian, through a reading comprehension on the manufacture of macaroni, I dipped into an English-language guidebook to the Crimea. The peninsula, I learned, is ten times the size of Luxembourg; Yalta boasts an obelisk commemorating Lenin’s decree, ‘On Utilizing the Crimea for the Treatment of Working People’; Planerskoye is home to a Museum of Gliding and Parachutism. There were statistics on the production of champanskaya and hosiery. All esoteric stuff; but, I reflected, my own interest in the Crimea – in the visit of a Moroccan who had been here for a few days in 1332 – was no less so.

  Later, over supper, I realized that my close focus could also be seen as tunnel vision. I was complaining about the price of cigarettes, which had risen by a fifth in a single day. I asked Nina if she thought I’d been cheated.

  She laughed. ‘Have you not heard? The rouble fell, more than one month ago – down, down! Now it is affecting our economy here. We Russians, the Ukrainians, your Tatars … no one is safe.’

  I admitted I hadn’t heard. Nina shook her head slowly, as if at a hopeless student. ‘Before 1991 we knew our future. Now it is shock after shock. We continue as we can; but this shock has been the hardest. Viktor Chernomyrdin – in case you do not know,’ she said pointedly, ‘he was the Prime Minister of Russia – compared it to the Tatar armies riding through the land, destroying. And you are not aware of it because you are busy with Battutah!’

  Later, back in the hotel, I remembered Chernomyrdin’s comment. So far I had met only one Tatar, but the Russian national conscious, it seemed, contained hordes of them. It was understandable, as the Tatars were the only force ever to have conquered its national home. In IB’s time, the princes of Muscovy were little more than tax collectors for Özbeg; their bid for independence fifty years later was answered by the sacking of Moscow by his grandson. Chaucer heard about it – ‘in the Londe of Tartarie/There dwelt a King that werried Russie’. Seven hundred years on, the Tatars were still apparently werrying the Russians. Perhaps that fourteenth-century face which for me suggested delicate ceramics and opulent metalwork had, for Nina, conjured up more threatening images.

  *

  I hadn’t realized the savagery of economics on the rampage. The following morning, the hotel cook joined me for coffee. I pieced her story together from her few fragments of English. She had been a naval architect. Now there was no money and no more navy to design. The kitchen of the Hotel Anonymous, as I thought of it, was the only place she could find work. The brief personal history was by any standards a tragedy. And yet, like Nina, she was stoical and stylishly clothed, and she shrugged magnificently when I asked her about the future. I left her frying breakfast eggs, dressed for a tea dance, and all for eight pounds sterling a month.

  I went to look for the imam but the mosque was locked. Instead, at the southern end of the town, I came across his mirror image. The setting was familiar: towers staring at the sea and wind keening through the power-lines – like Sinop, but several degrees colder, many shades greyer, and gnawed by decay. Bastions rose like shattered tombstones out of a graveyard of burnt grass and broken glass. A stream turned out to be a sewer; a children’s playground was smashed and abandoned, the swings rusted into rigor mortis. Several medieval churches and chapels stood among the desolation. I entered one of them and saw the faint remnants of a fresco, a line of apostles turning their faces towards a seated Christ – faces without features, lepers’ faces. There had been other figures but only the lines of their drapery survived, turning saints into shrouded spectres. There was no romance in these ruins. They looked like the aftermath not of time or economics, but of a plague.

  Only one building showed any sign of being looked after, a church with a high drum-shaped lantern topped by a new and tinny metal dome. Outside it three men were mixing cement and laying paving stones. One of them had the long beard of a priest. Like the imam, he was trying to provide something to latch on to in a disintegrating world.

  *

  I thought I was the only foreigner in Feodosia, until Nina invited me to supper again, to meet another protégé of hers. He was an Austrian haematologist called Gerhard, and he had brought his internet girlfriend Nadia – like Nina, a Feodosia Russian. Also present was Nina’s daughter Natasha, visiting from distant Nizhny Novgorod.

  ‘I am helping Nadia’, Nina explained, ‘to express herself to Gerhard.’ Nadia grinned and recrossed her legs. She was a strapping girl, built like a nutcracker, and looked quite capable of expressing herself without any assistance. She reminded me of the traveller Ibn Fadlan’s comment on the Volga Rus: ‘Never have I seen a people more perfectly formed. They are flaxen-haired, fair-skinned and tall as palm trees.’ As we ate, I quoted the description; then, tactlessly, followed it with I
B’s own picture of the Russians: ‘They have red hair, blue eyes and ugly faces, and they are a treacherous folk.’

  ‘That is not true!’ Nina retorted. Her opinion of my Battutah, never high, sank lower.

  It was late when we left, and Nina warned Gerhard and me not to speak English. It seemed a strange piece of advice, but she explained that there were many bad men about at night. I remembered the worried looks in Turkey when I had mentioned my trip to Kırım. We flagged down a taxi, the only vehicle about. Nadia sat in the front and engaged the driver in conversation, Gerhard and I in the back. It was almost impossible not to speak; throughout the journey we quivered silently with champanskaya-fuelled giggles, while the driver threw us dark looks in the mirror.

  *

  The following day, as I was finishing lunch in a restaurant, I spotted the imam walking past outside. I quickly paid my bill and trotted off in pursuit, but he had disappeared. I was keen to find out more from him about the history of the mosque. Whenever I went there it was shut, and this brief sighting was my only other glimpse of him.

  I was to find another clue in Stary Krim. IB had hired a wagon for the twenty-five-mile journey; I hired Viktor, a chunkily built taxi driver who, Nina intimated, might come in useful for other reasons. ‘Beware!’ she warned. ‘Stary Krim is not a good place.’

  My expectations of prowling post-Soviet mafiosi were unfulfilled. IB’s ‘large and fine’ city of al-Qiram felt more like an overblown village, with small neat houses set in orchards heavy with russet fruit. We made for the minaret of Özbeg’s mosque, which I had spotted on my journey to Feodosia. Again, building work was in progress – the stonework had been repointed and a fine wall was growing around the compound. The doorway of the mosque was framed by looping arabesques and bore an inscription, in which I made out ‘the exalted Sultan Muhammad Özbeg Khan’ and the date AH 713 – AD 1314. Below this was something instantly familiar: in the arch above the door itself, the stones interlocked with the same jigsaw joints that I had seen in Feodosia. The similarity in profile seemed too close for coincidence. I couldn’t prove it, but I felt certain that the Feodosia mosque of 1623 incorporated a much earlier structure – the very one in which IB had stayed and made war on the churchbells.