Amurath to Amurath

by Bell, Gertrude

  Boran Dereh Keui is a Muhâjir village, that is to say, it is peopled by Circassian immigrants from the Caucasus. They have filled the valley of the Zamantî Su, and though they are not liked by the indigenous population, their coming has raised very sensibly the level of civilization. Forty years ago the Zamantî valley was innocent of any settled habitation; the nomad Avshars drove their flocks up to it in the summer, sowed scanty crops, and left before the first winter snows. Now it is all under the plough, and the Circassian villages, with their osier beds and neat vegetable gardens, are scattered thickly along it. Nomad life dies out in a cultivated country, and the Avshars are settling into villages, though their houses are not so well built, nor their gardens so well kept as those of the Circassians. The chief town of the district is ’Azîzîyeh. There we changed zaptiehs, and I sat in the konak while the necessary arrangements were being made and drank coffee with the officials. Presently there appeared one who was half a negro and told me his tale in the strong, guttural Arabic of the desert. He was a native of the Ḥejâz; he had wandered up into this country before there were any villages in it and had remained as a merchant.

  “It is very beautiful here,” said I.

  “Yes,” said he, “but the desert is different. I have not seen it for forty years.” And I understood what was in his heart.

  Behind the konak a plentiful spring bursts out from under the cliffs. I walked up to it and saw men digging up old walls in quest of cut stones. Fragments of columns and rude mouldings pointed to the former presence of a church, and perhaps an earlier shrine hallowed, in true Anatolian fashion, the abundant source. From ’Azîzîyeh we turned our faces to Mount Argæus and travelled along a well-laid road to Ekrek. Among the hills at some distance to the right of the road stands the castle of Maḥmûd Ghâzî, magnificently placed upon a peak. My zaptieh told me that in spite of its name it was a Christian fortress, for he had seen crosses carved upon the lintels, and only the distaste for further excursions that follows upon long stages of mountain travel, prevented me from going up to it. I have a shrewd suspicion that it must be the Tsamandos of the Byzantine historians. Ekrek, where we pitched camp, is built in the bottom of one of the deep valleys which are typical of the district about Argæus. The lava with which the plain is covered forms a sharp cliff on either lip of these gorges, and in places the formation of the volcanic beds is so distinct that the lava can be seen lying like a solid pavement upon the soil, broken off at the edges of the valley and scattered down the slopes in huge slabs. Before I got into camp I turned off to see a small ruined church of no very great interest, and within the town there are several larger churches, all remodelled by the Armenian inhabitants. The early Christian architecture of the eastern side of Cappadocia was unknown to me except from books, and finding myself in St. Basil’s own country, I seized the opportunity of visiting some of the buildings which sprang up with the monastic impulse which he implanted. Instead of making straight for Cæsarea I rode next day under the slopes of the Köleteh Dâgh to the ruins of the Panagia above the village of Köpekli, and so to Tomarza, where there is one of the finest of the Cappadocian ruins (Fig. 220). Both these buildings exhibit the Anatolian type of the domed cruciform, which was already familiar to me, but the decorative details, the engaged pilasters upon the outer walls, the elaborate mouldings, the string-courses carved over doors and windows, are not to be found in the churches that lie further to the west. I sat that night in the Armenian monastery where I was lodged, and pondered over the artistic tradition which these things revealed, and the mingling of occidental with oriental themes which they implied. Not far to the south-east of Tomarza stands among the hills the famous shrine of Comana, sacred to the goddess Ma. With its ancient Asiatic cult and its temples constructed or reconstructed in the Imperial period, Comana was one of the great meeting-places of the culture of East and West; its buildings must have exercised a strong influence over the architecture of eastern Cappadocia, and I determined to seek among its ruins evidences of the age that had preceded the early Christian.

  The Armenian priest, whose guest I was, was eager to relate to me the anxieties through which he and his congregation had passed during the last two months. Tomarza lay just beyond the zone of the recent outbreak, but at Shahr, the village which occupies the site of Comana, there had been a “masaleh” (an incident), though he did not enter into particulars as to its character. It was evident that he regarded my interest in antiquities as a mere cloak wherewith to cover a political purpose, and since I was not at the pains to undeceive him—if indeed it had been possible to make my aims clear to him—the announcement of my intention to visit Comana gave him yet stronger grounds for his conviction. By all Tomarza I was regarded as an itinerant missionary collecting evidence with regard to the massacre. The proximity of missionary schools was attested in varying degrees by the acquirements of the population. As I walked through the streets I was met by a young man who accosted me in French.

  “Vous parlez français?” said he.

  “Mais oui,” said I.

  “Vous parlez bien?” he continued.

  “Très bien,” I answered unblushingly, and he was obliged to take my word for it, for when I inquired whether he were a native of Tomarza, he could not understand until I repeated the question in Turkish.

  My next interlocutor was a boy who spoke English, which he had learnt, and learnt well, in an American college where he had taken his degree. He asked if he might know my name, and when I had obliged him in this particular, he begged that he might be told my object in coming to Tomarza. But I, being at the moment too busy with the ruins of the church to answer so many questions, replied that I had no object, and reduced him to a discomfited silence. The springs of action are different in American colleges.

  We left Tomarza at ten o’clock and journeyed into the hills by way of Suvagen, which we reached at 12.40. Almost immediately after we had left the village, we entered a gorge, and our path climbed up through the pine-woods to Kokur Ḳayâ, a small yaila near the top of the pass known as Ḳara Bel. Here we pitched camp at five in the afternoon, close under the snow-wreaths that clung to the northern side of a rocky chain of peaks. Until sunset the clear fresh notes of a cuckoo filled the alp, and all that he had to say was worth hearing; but I wondered whether he enjoyed the society of his brother the kite, whose thin rippling cry dropped down from the rocks above him. I did not take my camp over the pass to Comana, but set out next day with Fattûḥ and a zaptieh and such simple provisions as might enable us to spend a night away from our tents if we found it necessary. Before we started I covenanted with the zaptieh, who was unusually pious, that prayers should be suspended for the day, the previous day’s journey having been seriously upset by the occurrence of the ’aṣr (the hour of afternoon prayer), though every one knows that there is a special dispensation with regard to travellers.

  The long grassy pass opens on to a confused prospect of desolate mountains and hardly less deserted valleys; the gnarled and twisted pine-woods clinging to the rocks, the flowering hawthorn and regiments of yellow mullein that lined the lower course of the stream, gave to our road a memorable beauty, and if the going was not so good as might have been desired, why, we had seen worse. In the midst of these wild solitudes, five hours from Kokur Ḳayâ, we came upon a ruined shrine. It was a temple-mausoleum, and in this respect the true forerunner of the memorial churches of the Anatolian plateau (Fig. 226); nor did the connection between the Christian and the Pagan work cease here. The shallow engaged pilasters, broken by a moulding into two storeys, which are found in the churches, were present in the temple; if the string-courses did not yet form a continuous band over the window arches, it was easy to see how obvious the transition to the later type would be, and the character of the profiles was the same here as in the churches (Fig. 227). The lower part of the temple contained a vault filled with loculi; the eastern end of the upper floor was ruined and overgrown with thick brushwood, but I have no doubt that it could be
disengaged and planned without difficulty. Some clearing away of earth and shrubs would be required before it would be possible to make out the nature of a building, indicated by masses of dressed stones and broken columns, which was placed immediately to the south of the temple, but the ruins standing above ground were an exceedingly instructive link in the chain of Cappadocian architecture, and I rode down to Shahr full of hope. The village lies in the heart of a valley cut out by the Gök Su, a tributary of the Saiḥûn. Its sheltered fields were covered with corn, its gardens planted with fruit-trees, but the streets and houses were no less ruined than the temples of the Great Goddess. The hot breath of massacre had passed down the smiling vale and left Shahr a heap of ashes. I found the inhabitants huddled together on a bluff where half-a-dozen of their dwellings had escaped destruction. A young school-master from the American college of Tarsus told me the story in my own tongue. He was himself a native of Shahr, and chance had brought him back to his home shortly before the outbreak at Adana and Tarsus. Of this disaster, which began upon April 14, the people of Shahr had received no information until, on April 20, the Kurds, Turks and Circassians from the neighbouring Moslem villages appeared in arms and announced that they did not intend to leave a single Christian alive. The villagers of Shahr had eighty rifles among them. Thus armed they defended the bluff, on which stand the ruins of the chief shrine of Ma, for nine days, at the end of which time tardy help arrived from ’Azîzîyeh. They had not lost a life, but they had been powerless to prevent the destruction of the village in the valley. Every house was looted and burnt; of the bazaars nothing remained but blackened foundations; the charred beams of the bridge had fallen into the stream, and the only wall that yet stood in the low ground was a splendid fragment of ancient masonry facing the river.

  “Why,” said I, gazing upon the ruin heaps that had once been the school-master’s house, “did they spare the fruit-trees and the corn?”

  “They thought that we should be dead before the corn was ripe,” he answered, “and they meant to reap it for themselves. Also the fruit-trees they looked on as their own. Besides these we have nothing left, and we are so much troubled by hunger.”

  They were as much troubled by the thought that they could not offer me a fitting hospitality. The oda (the village guest-chamber) was in ashes, and the few houses on the bluff were crowded with women and children. But there was nothing to detain me. The ancient buildings had suffered with the modern; the inscribed stones and acanthus capitals, relics of a golden past, which had decked the streets of the bazaar, lay blackened and half buried among the ruins, and after I had made a brief survey of the site, I handed over to the school-master the little money that was in my purse, and turned back across the hills. The dusk gathered about us as we climbed up to the pass, but the road that we had followed so gaily in the morning was full of darker shadows than those of night. “Nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine,” cried out from riven crag and blasted pine; mountain and valley joined in her chorus, strophe to antistrophe. Mercilessly she creates and destroys; the fury of the storm, the sharp blade of the frost, the senseless passions of mankind, are alike of her ordering.

  The ruins of Shahr were the sole evidence which I saw with my own eyes of the far-reaching havoc wrought by the outbreak at Adana, but before I reached Konia I had opportunity to judge of its lasting effect. In Cæsarea trade was paralyzed by the economic annihilation of the rich province of Cilicia, as well as by the fear of further disturbances. The massacres had struck terror into the heart of Moslem and of Christian; they extinguished for a time the new-born hopes of peace, and roused once more the hatred between creed and creed which the authors of the constitution had undertaken to allay. Every section of the community suffered from a destruction of confidence which is even more disastrous than the destruction of wealth, though the Armenians suffered incomparably the most. But the fact that they bore a penalty out of proportion to their fault does not acquit them of blame. They had helped to bring upon themselves the calamity that overwhelmed them; by wild oratory they had laid themselves open to the accusations of conspiracy which were brought against them; they had kindled the flames of discord by preaching in their churches the obligation of revenge. The criminal folly of their utterances stirred up vague alarms in the breasts of an ignorant and fanatical population, and from whatever side came the incitement to outrage, it came to ears sharpened by anxiety. But it must be remembered that in several instances catastrophe was averted by the prompt action of the officials who controlled the threatened districts. In Cæsarea the Mutesarrif, rather than allow a repetition of the Adana tragedy, ordered his soldiers to fire upon the Moslem crowd, who clamoured about the serai for arms on the plea that their lives were in danger from the Christians, and his uncompromising attitude brought the town to order; the Ḳâimmaḳâm of Eregli patrolled the streets night after night during a week of panic; the Mutesarrif of Kozan drove back the armed bands of Circassians who had marched down from the mountains bent on slaughter. Wherever it became evident that the government was not on the side of disorder, disorder was nipped in the bud, and I heard of one example where a handful of Turkish soldiers held in check many hundreds of Kurds, and the Christian village which they had assembled to destroy escaped untouched. I believe that no great massacre has taken place in Turkey without the encouragement of the central authority, or a passivity which amounts to connivance on the part of the local officials; a strong Vâlî backed by an enlightened government would keep peace in the most fanatical province of the empire.

  On our way back to Tomarza we passed a large encampment of Avshars. The tents of these Turkish nomads are of a pattern which is common to nearly all the tribes of central Asia, but entirely different from that of the Arabs (Fig. 229). They are round, with a domed roof of felt supported on bent withes, and the sides are of plaited rushes over which a woollen curtain is hung when the nights are cold. We did not sleep a second night at Tomarza, but marched a couple of hours further upon the road to Cæsarea, and camped at the village of Mardîn, which lies in a cleft of the lava beds under the twin peaks of Mount Argæus. Next day we skirted the flanks of the great volcano, passing by the ruined Sarî Khân and under the small peak of ’Alî Dâgh, which is (so I was credibly informed by my zaptieh) nothing but a stray boulder dropped by ’Alî ibn abi Tâlib when he was engaged in helping the Prophet to pile up the huge mass of Argæus. Not only the geographical features of the land, but also the physical and moral qualities of the inhabitants of Cæsarea came under our consideration as we rode.

  “If a serpent bites a man of Ḳaiṣarîyeh,” observed Fattûḥ, “the serpent dies.”

  “Jânum!” exclaimed the zaptieh (who was not a Cæsarean). “My soul! they can outwit the devil himself. Have you not heard the tale?”

  “I have not heard,” said Fattûḥ.

  “This it is,” said the zaptieh. “Upon a day the devil came to Ḳaiṣarîyeh. ‘Khush geldi,’ said the people, ‘a fair welcome,’ and they showed him the streets and the bazaars of the city, the mosques and the khâns, all of them. When he was hungry they set food before him till he was well satisfied, but when he rose to depart, he looked for his cloak and belt and they were gone. The devil is not safe from the thieves of Ḳaiṣarîyeh.”

  “God made them rogues,” said Fattûḥ.

  “What can we do?” observed the zaptieh philosophically. “Dunya bîr, jânum—the world is all one.”

  “Great travelling they make,” continued Fattûḥ. “In every city you meet them.”

  The zaptieh was ready with historic evidence on this head also.

  “There was a man,” said he, “who lived some time in Cæsarea, and having had experience of the people, he found them to be all pigs. Therefore he resolved to journey to the furthest end of the earth, that he might escape from them. And he went to Baghdâd, which is a long road.”

  “It is long,” admitted Fattûḥ.

  “And then he entered the bath and demanded a good ḥammâm
jî to knead the weariness out of his bones. And the owner of the bath called out: ‘Bring the lame Cæsarean!’ Then said the traveller: ’A Cæsarean here and he lame!’ and he fled from Baghdâd.”