The Sultan of Byzantium

by Selcuk Altun

  Still, when she whispered, ‘Are you abandoned or abandoning?’ in my ear, the charismatic woman was almost sure that I would spill my guts to her. I began my narrative like a character in a pop song: ‘If a man is going to be abandoned, he first has to have a lover. I was eliminated in the previous stage: the proposal.’ Instead of answers or diagnoses from Wendy I wanted to hear comic prognostications, as though she were a crone of a fortune teller who’d chanced to come my way. By rights the night ought to end with a witty remark or two, after which I should go out and hunt up a prostitute.

  ‘Wherever did you get the idea that not answering a text message means “No”. The Brazilian soap operas? Believe me, you’d have been rejected with a sentence if she had negative feelings about you. This young woman is quite possibly just waiting for the right opportunity to call you.’

  ‘Wendy, until that development occurs, may I call you Aunt Pollyanna?’

  ‘It’s nothing to me, young fellow with the unusual name. But if some day you do manage to marry the girl with the beautiful name, send a plane ticket along with my wedding invitation.’

  The card she left on my table said that Wendy Sade was a literature professor at Florida State University. (Did I know this spirited professor, whose name sounded like a pseudonym, from somewhere else?)

  I met the morning in Venerotica. To gain admission to this nightclub, where male clients wore masks, I first had to meet a one-legged pimp on the Rialto Bridge, and then follow him for ten minutes.

  On the day before carnival began, I moved on to neighboring Ravenna, which had served as Byzantium’s representative in Italy from the sixth to the eighth centuries. I stayed at the Hotel Byzantio and visited the churches trying vainly to compete with Haghia Sophia in the field of mosaics. I found traces of Constantinople in the Piazza del Popolo; and I realized that I’d had enough of Byzantine relics here in this town where my fellow citizen, Basilios Bessarion, exhaled his last breath. I don’t really know why, but I flew to Nice – the city of Reha Ekin’s suicide – and grew bored with its spa-camp atmosphere in two days. I then dropped in on Seville, merely because a retired sea captain said, in the lobby of Le Meridien, ‘The worst thing that can happen to a man in Seville is to be born blind.’ I picked Lausanne, which was suffering an invasion of aged tourists, by personal lottery. Because the first letter of its name happened to be ‘H’, I went to Hamburg. The reason for Nantes was its last letter, ‘S’; and for Liege, its five letters. I read all six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and returned to London. There I reunited with my team. Askaris did not find my thesis that historians would make good dream interpreters funny. When my grandmother phoned on the morning of March 6 and posed her sarcastic question, ‘Spring is coming and where are you, son of a worthless American?’ I was busy making up my calendar of work at the Research Center for Byzantine History.

  OMICRON

  I felt like the keeper of a lighthouse stuck in the middle of a valley. I was at a rock hotel at Uçhisar, the highest point of Cappadocia. Suite 234 of the Cappadocia Cave Resort had probably been carved out by a Hittite family 4000 years ago. For the umpteenth time I stood by the window to inhale the view of the fairy chimneys filling the panorama. I listened to the silence of the rock and thumbed my virtual prayer beads as I focused on the chimneys one by one.

  I don’t believe that the conical masses people call fairy chimneys erupted 25 million years ago from the volcanic mountain range thirty-five miles away. That’s as dubious to me as all those pages of official Byzantine history. Or maybe the volcanic mountain that threw them out vanished into thin air afterward, like an octopus dying after giving birth?

  When I was in high school, the fashion was to liken the fairy chimneys to Indian wigwams. But now I regarded them as shamans assembled to perform auspicious ceremonies. They’d kept their real colors from the photographers, which I thought was an act of poetry. I felt the sun’s respect for this melancholy rainbow of colors. The valley imposed its rules of silence on humans, minarets and the zoo of animals in the Hittite reliefs. If I asked, ‘Why didn’t other volcanoes create such artistic lava?’, it would be a trick question.

  The valley that from my hotel window looked like a messy table top, up close looked like an exhibition sculpture. I don’t believe either that the word ‘Cappadocia’ came from the Persian and meant ‘land of beautiful horses’. Only a camel would do as a metaphor for this sea of silence.

  Cappadocia lay between the first civilization, Mesopotamia, and the city-states of western Anatolia. The Hittites came down from the Caucasus and settled in this strategic corridor. Official history skipped the fact that they were art teachers to the Greeks. It’s also interesting that historians cannot agree on the dates of their rise and fall. They rivaled nature in sculpting and were more accomplished in this field than any other civilization. Maybe it was this rivalry that did them in, as they went extinct by famine in the seventh century B.C.

  First it was the fundamentalist Christians banned by the Romans, then the eastern Christians fleeing from the Arabs, and after that the Byzantine Christians frightened by the Iconoclasts who took cover in Cappadocia. There, by patiently carving out the conical rocks, they made many a monk’s cell, monastery and church. They even hollowed out underground cities where they could hide from pagan armies.

  My expedition to Cappadocia lasted two days. The valley was as full of mystery as a chessboard made up of an unknown number of squares and pieces. Here, for mortals, nature modeled the divinity of silence and the wisdom of patience. I felt myself growing lighter as I walked, like a hotair balloon slipping its ballast. I wondered how many holy places there were thousands of years ago if there were only 300 of them open to tourists today. The biblical stories in those claustrophobic caves were as vivid as if they had been inscribed a thousand days ago. In fact, those dim places didn’t need a lot to be ready for an evening Mass. They looked like they might have been sending a message to the massive and over-ornamented churches of Constantinople.

  In the Göreme Open Air Museum, standing at the door of the Girls’ Monastery, a seventy-year-old American woman ran her hand over the fairy chimney and said, ‘Why is the surface of this monolith so soft? It feels like it would crumble if I pushed it hard. Can it really be 20 million years old?’

  Her dried-up husband, in shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, who would have been a contender in the Ugly Old Age Pageant, said, ‘Well, honey, if you consider that alligators have been having a good time in our fresh water for the last 200 million years, maybe these cones could actually use some more time.’

  The million tourists who come to Cappadocia each year prefer spring or fall. They’re mostly elderly Christians from all corners of the world, plus a few quiet Far Easterners. Some of them unconsciously want to fulfil a religious duty before passing away. As they zigzagged among the fairy chimneys they lit up like country kids taken to an amusement park in late childhood.

  The outskirts of the valley possessed the quietness of a desert or inland sea; in the far corners the calm belonged to a cotton field or an abandoned farm. As the owls saluted the sunset Cappadocia turned slowly into a deserted monastery, and this was excellent.

  The Cappadocian grandmother of John Newberry, my neighbor at the hotel, was subject to the population exchange of 1924. When her family had trouble adapting to life in Thessalonica they emigrated to Melbourne. John was a retiree and a widower. In honor of his grandmother’s memory, he sat on his balcony admiring the view of Erciyes Mountain, cracking and eating pumpkin seeds one by one. He expressed amazement that I didn’t know the Australian player on the Galatasaray football team, Harry Kewell, and I tried to win forgiveness by reciting a stanza written by his fellow citizen, the poet Les Murray.

  On the second day the team and I went to the Ihlara Valley in the hotel van. The driver, Tahir, was a small man with a shining face. If I cracked a joke to him he would lower his head, embarrassed. Maybe modesty was a character trait left
behind from the monastery phase of the place. I knew Pappas would be the first to laugh at my theory about the small size of the Cappadocians (so that they could take shelter in the fairy chimneys on the day before Doomsday).

  The valley with the lyrical name, Ihlara, was a good thirty miles from the hotel. I was getting used to feeling like our road was taking us across the weary Patagonian plateau. Millions of years ago, when Hasandağ, killer of so many mountain climbers, exercised its right to erupt, Melendiz Creek flooded the fissures and probably prevented a camp of fairy chimneys from forming here. Ihlara was quite a mystical canyon, which was no doubt why, since the sixth century, so many hermit’s cells, churches, tombs for nobles, and other structures were hewn from the rocky cliffs rising up from the stream.

  We disembarked from the van at a point that rose 500 feet above the valley floor, where we could, as Tahir put it, be in command of the panorama and look down at the creek snaking along like a rope. As I stepped out, a ten-year-old girl materialized in front of me. Apparently her faded T-shirt and cotton trousers did double duty as pajamas at night. The man’s black jacket she wore over them – maybe for camouflage – was at least two sizes too big. She had fair skin, a long face, and bright almond-colored eyes. Her ancestors might well have included a Byzantine beauty who sought refuge in the valley a thousand years ago.

  ‘Welcome to Ihlara,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘And is your name as pretty as your face?’

  ‘It’s Naile.’

  ‘Naile, what in the world are you doing on top of a mountain all by yourself?’

  ‘I’m a guide.’

  This got a laugh, but Naile didn’t seem to mind, maybe because she was used to the reaction.

  ‘Well then, our young guide, tell us how the Ihlara Valley was formed.’

  Naile brought her two feet together and turned toward Hasandağ. In a charming tone she made an impressive presentation parallel to the guidebook’s. Listening to her, I felt at once lighthearted and regretful for my delayed fatherhood, with no children of my own to enjoy. As I rummaged through my pockets for small bills to make up fifty liras, she told me that she would be a fifth-grader next year, and if she won a scholarship for indigent students, she hoped one day to become a teacher. She had some trouble extracting her right hand from the pocket of the big jacket.

  ‘Why are you wearing that jacket in this hot weather?’ I asked.

  ‘My mother won’t let me go around without it.’

  ‘Well, that’s curious. Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t have an arm below my elbow,’ she said, and bowed her head apologetically. I felt a wave of pity for this young girl, who had lightened my spirits, more than for the primitive mentality of hiding a physical disability. I felt like a harsh wind had just stripped the petals from a rare and fragile flower as I stood admiring its beauty.

  I had a quick meeting with the team. I borrowed half of all the money they had with them for half a day, added it to all the money I had in my pocket, and put two thousand liras in an envelope. I asked Naile where she lived. Her father was dead; she lived with her mother at her grandfather Haci Ali’s house. I put the envelope in the right-hand pocket of her jacket as we sat on neighboring rocks.

  ‘Naile, please give my greetings to your mother and to Haci Ali Efendi, and say this: “I helped out four gentlemen today. They liked me very much and sent this money with me for my education.” And be sure to tell Haci Efendi that the money was earned honestly.

  ‘Say “The youngest of them is the boss and he grew up like me, an orphan. He has a small problem and he asked me to pray for him.” He said, “Since you’re a smart girl with a pure heart, God will accept your prayers.” He said he would visit us when he gets his problem solved, and then he will see that my arm is fixed. He said he would pay my school expenses too, until I receive my diploma.’

  I made her repeat her lines until she had them down. Pappas took our picture as I held her in an embrace. When I knelt to say good-bye, she put her good arm around my neck and burst into tears. My eyes were wet too. She said ‘Thank you’ and disappeared behind the rocks, bounding down the path like a young goat.

  If I thought that Pappas wouldn’t seize the occasion to pile on compliments, I would have said, ‘I’ll never make an emperor even in exile, will I?’ We walked back to the van and I recalled to him the lines by Cahit Sitki Taranci, the poet who actually died when he was forty-six: ‘Thirty-five years old and halfway down the road.’

  ‘Meeting Naile was a breaking point for me,’ I said. ‘It reminded me that I’m thirty-four. It’s time for me to get married – by next year – and start loving my own children.’

  *

  After a long but pleasurable slalom down the hillside, we came to the floor of the Ilhara Valley and sat for lunch at an open-air restaurant next to the Melendiz River, which had been reduced to creek category by old age. The valley had in the meantime become a universally acclaimed hiking preserve. The adjacent tables held European tourists who had just completed their tours. They were mostly middle-aged and wearing perhaps slightly exaggerated expressions of gratitude for ‘mission accomplished’.

  I started out on the hiking path from the village of Belisirma, a Byzantine leftover. Our destination was the Yilanli Church. We followed the winding path, keeping the Melendiz on our left. The coyly flowing creek and the birds singing in whispers bolstered the mystical atmosphere. At every step the botanical scene shifted, with a different kind of tree in our path. The braggart poplar and willow trees stood like an army of spears, yet despite them the most attractive plant of the valley was the oleaster trees, which gave off a subtle scent. I felt a lightness in my being as I trailed a flock of butterflies as small as bees. A feeling of peace suffused the place.

  The Direkli Church that popped up on our right was not on our agenda, but I couldn’t resist its challenge. I gave the order to climb the rocky path. The church, which at first appeared to be a spacious cave, was carved out by exiles fleeing the Iconoclast controversy. The artist who painted the biblical frescoes on the ceiling must have splashed them on in two hours and run away. The thin pillars, narrow chapels, and tiny nooks squeezed in here and there around the place made me feel like I was on a Noah’s Ark lowered down below ground level.

  I wanted to shout ‘Open Sesame!’ when I came to the apse with a Judgment Day fresco inside its dome. A little later I felt a sudden trepidation – was the dagger-shaped piece of plaster dangling from the narthex a bad omen? I smiled and moved on, my mind trying to figure out why wild animals didn’t move into these untended caves. Heading back down the path, Pappas slipped and fell, and I helped him up, whispering in his ear, ‘I’ll have to ask Nomo why they put a potato sack like you on my trail.’

  We continued walking energetically in an eastern direction. The path carried us along like an anonymous poem, without a single line slipping into the margins. The afternoon was advancing; hardly anybody else was out, only a swaying group of Japanese coming back from their tour. A lot of churches have frescoes of Saint George slaying the anti-religious dragon or serpent, and so are called ‘Yilanli’, ‘snake’ churches. The reason why I chose the Yilanli Church in the Ihlara Valley was that I wanted to see the picture of Christ sitting with crossed legs. And I was curious about the twenty-four saints representing the twenty-four letters of the Byzantine alphabet.

  We went on walking east. As the afternoon matured, the presence of nature grew less emphatic. We crossed to the left side of the creek over a bridge that resembled an overturned boat. The climb to the Yilanli Church seemed to be developing into a bit of a challenge for the team. It was actually a cross-shaped chapel cut from the rock in the ninth century. I liked the anarchic feel of it as I wandered around with my flashlight. Christ was not only sitting on the floor with his legs crossed but also had the irritated look of someone caught by paparazzi in an unofficial pose. The twenty-four saints, each representing a letter, looked as perplexed as suspects in a Hollywood
movie, put in a line-up to face the victim. The biblical stories on the walls gave off a kind of animated movie warmth. According to my guidebook, the winged devil behind a Christ-figure was saying, ‘Son of God, invite me to your holy supper tonight.’ The last image carried a warning: it was a woman who would not give suck to her children being bitten on her breasts by two snakes. I said to Pappas, ‘Don’t you think this place looks like a bar abandoned because the owner couldn’t find a bartender to work for him?’ He laughed.

  I delivered the good news that the expedition was over. We were walking back toward the small bridge when Askaris suddenly leaped on me, shouting, ‘Excellency, look out!’ We fell to the ground together as a man on the rocks above the church fired three times at us with a pistol. The sound of the bullets sailing over my head was lyrical. Kalligas emptied his own miniature revolver in return, but Askaris opined that by then the shadow wearing a black ski mask was long gone.

  I picked myself up from the dirt and said to Askaris, ‘I can’t extend my thanks to you, Askaris. But I can say that you didn’t do a bad job of administering the Nomo test for courage.’

  *

  My third day in Cappadocia. Three is the magic number in fairy tales. But it was not a good sign that I thought about this. Was something more ominous waiting for me in the land of fairy chimneys? Well, I didn’t care even if there was. I was getting bored with this chess game I’d been sucked into. Perhaps the ‘Stockholm syndrome’ I couldn’t get over had something to do with it.

  It was impossible to see the sunrise because of the forty or more hot-air tourist balloons polluting the sky. I couldn’t imagine the excitement levels of the people in those brightly colored balloons that could hang in the same place for half an hour. But I was sure they cared little for the poetic side of their flame-powered ascension. I took breakfast in my room and waited for the first wave of tourists to clear the churches. I opened Ba, by the poet Birhan Keskin.