by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
Klein does not paint a utopia; there was mutual suspicion and tensions not just between Jews and Muslims but also Christians. But, says Klein, this ‘does not obviate the wealth of evidence for a local Arab-Jewish identity. Members of the two nations conducted their web of daily interactions on a different plane from that laid out by official theology.’46 One very obvious symbol for co-existence before British Mandate was that the Muslim, Christian and Jewish quarters of Jerusalem were not strictly kept; people lived across these borders, whereas now the Israeli and Palestinian sides of town are, residentially at least, deeply segregated.
In Jerusalem, there are walls within walls, and communities that remain completely hidden from sight. One evening by Jaffa Gate, I arranged to meet George Hintlian, an Armenian scholar. I arrived early for our rendezvous and was scanning the crowd when he hove unhurriedly into view – I instinctively picked him out, a man with the confidence of a seventy-two-year-old who has long enjoyed local respect, the endearing scruffiness of an eccentric bachelor and bushy grey sideburns which reminded me of a bonvivant character from a French film of the 1960s.
‘So,’ said George without preamble, fixing me with a friendly but scrutinising eye. You’re Turkish? Hoşgeldin – welcome!’ To my surprise, I found myself speaking Turkish with a first-generation Jerusalemite Armenian as we strolled by the walls of the Old City; he spoke fluently, telling me what a joy it was to speak the language he’d learned from his parents, who escaped the Armenian genocide in their twenties. Both witnessed terrible things, losing family members in the death marches; George’s father acted as court translator in the British trials of the Young Turks who had ordered the genocide. But somehow, they never lost their love for Turkey, and passed it on to their children. George tells me how he grew up being regaled with stories about life back in the good old days, and listening to Turkish songs his father sang for him and his sister. He visibly enjoys himself as we talk, laughing as we trot out particular idioms, commenting on my British accent, asking about his own, congratulating both of us on our flawed fluency.
‘Listen to us! Not perfect, but şöyle böyle, we’re alright. I miss Turkish. Sometimes I speak it to myself, not to forget.’
That night over dinner, he told me how for most of his life he had studied accounts of the Armenian genocide and interviewed survivors like his parents, consumed with the injustice of both the genocide itself but, more importantly, the Turkish government’s refusal to admit it. In 2015, however, the year of the centenary, he suddenly gave up. He realized Turkey would not acknowledge the genocide during his lifetime, and after half a century immersing himself in its history, ‘drowning in its blood’, as he put it, as he relived its events with the 800 survivors he interviewed, he felt it was all for nothing. ‘I have looked into hell,’ he told me, then shrugged expressively. ‘Now what?’
Only semi-joking, he told me that he was glad to have met me now, when he no longer hates Turks. Privately, I reflect that it is also lucky that I’ve met him after visiting the Genocide Museum in Yerevan. George’s hatred dissipated with the anniversary in 2015, and he has begun to feel sorry for the Turks living through Erdoğan’s regime. He says the bridges he had just begun to build with Turkish historians have all been destroyed in the purge ofjournalists, teachers and academics since the coup attempt of 2016, because these academics are either in jail or in exile, and he himself can’t return to Turkey because of his lobbying.
‘Maybe in ten years’ time the present generation of Turkish intellectuals will come to understand what exile means,’ George ruminated. ‘Maybe, it will bring us [Armenians and Turks] closer together. Of course,’ he added rather touchingly, ‘I am not so egotistical as to expect these people will be worrying about the Armenians. They have enough to worry about at the moment.’
We talked about the psychological toll of exile on a diasporic people. ‘The Armenians are similar to the Palestinians,’ said George. ‘Obsessed with their lost homeland to the point that it occupies all their mental energies.’ He clearly includes himself in this classification. As we part, he gives me an article he wrote about some of the stories he has heard over the last fifty years from genocide survivors in Jerusalem; reading it later, I find it almost unbearably painful. What is almost more painful, however, is the way George has always cherished his family’s oral history with barely anything to connect him to his ancestral homeland:
‘My family came from Talas, near the birth place of Saint Sabbas [a Syrian 5th-century monk], in Cappadocia, but I had never seen any picture of Talas, nor was there any picture of my grandfather and the family. I have never seen a picture of my uncle who died on the death march at the age of four, nor of the house which they left behind. What hovered in my mind was only graphic and vivid descriptions.’
Two days after our dinner, George took me on a tour round the monastery of St James Cathedral, where he has lived all his life along with many other families of those who escaped the genocide and were taken in by the resident Armenian Orthodox community of Jerusalem at the time. The monastery is vast, a grand medieval maze of cloisters, high walls and unexpectedly spacious courtyards. As we passed people, George called out theatrically to them in Turkish, introducing me. ‘This is Alev. She is a Turk.’ He was clearly a local beloved ‘Uncle George’ character; they greeted him with a wide smile and nodded at me curiously before moving on.
‘Her family is from Maraş – and that man is from Kutahya. See that girl? She’s from Kayseri.’ I noticed he used the present tense. George pointed to a group of children playing by the walls of the church: ‘They have been brought up to hate the Turks because the Turks are the deniers of the genocide. People like me, first-generation Jerusalemites, and second generation, we don’t hate the Turks. We know from our parents how fond they were of Turkey. If you speak the language, you can’t hate the people. But these kids – Turkish is just another language to them like French or Spanish.’
Again and again on my travels, I saw this – language is the key to a shared culture, and to understanding people. In the library of the monastery, George showed me stacks of records from each town in Anatolia detailing family stories and village life – Ottoman journals, newspapers, including the first periodical published in Armenian, in 1746 in Madras, India. Looking at the stacks and stacks of books and papers, and momentarily distracted by the twin Siamese cats who roam the library, I wished passionately that I could read Armenian.
Upkeep of such a library is expensive – the entire monastery complex is funded by the foundation of Calouste Gulbenkian, the famous Ottoman Armenian philanthropist. Gulbenkian was born in Istanbul in 1869 and made a vast fortune by discovering oil in Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq – for Sultan Abdul Hamid II. In 1896, however, he and his family had to flee as Armenians were massacred in the aftermath of the recent wars with the Russians in the east of the empire, a harbinger of the genocide to follow twenty years later. Gulbenkian went on to become one of the richest men in the world, advising European governments on oil fields in the Middle East, and amassing a huge art collection. He gave away much of his money to Armenian charity projects, including the St James Cathedral and monastery in Jerusalem, as well as the St Sarkis church in London, which he intended as a sanctuary for ‘dispersed Armenians’ like himself.
The 12th-century Cathedral of St James is a living museum of Ottoman Armenian history. When I arrive with George, young men in slightly sinister black hooded cloaks are singing near the altar. While we wait for the service to finish, I look around at silver filigree lamps hanging from the beams of the church and the beautiful wooden doors to hidden rooms – the church is a bewildering mixture of styles from Damascus, Istanbul and Greece. I have a brief but genuine moment of quasi-religious peace in an alcove lit with long tapered candles, rudely interrupted when George points out to me the traditional blue-and-white Iznik tiles on the pillars, in particular the small crosses in the design, denoting that these were a batch destined for Armenian churches, while others w
ere shipped off to be fixed in mosques. A wooden board hangs from chains outside the door of the cathedral, and is still hit by wooden hammers to call the faithful to prayer, a continued custom from Ottoman times when church bells were banned – We had to keep a low profile,’ as George put it.
This ‘low profile’ reminded me that, for all the friendship and cultural ties between Muslims and non-Muslims in Ottoman Jerusalem, there was still hierarchy which subdued non-Muslim worship in public life, and that led to resentment towards the authorities who policed them. On one wall inside the church, a series of Iznik tiles forms a storyboard showing scenes from the Bible; the sultan’s soldiers, the janissaries, are depicted harassing Jesus and his disciples, even though they were several centuries early for the time of Christ. As George explained, janissaries were the bogymen in the consciousness of these Ottoman Armenian artisans, just as they were for their Balkan subjects, hence their inclusion in art, regardless of anachronisms – another example of the ‘authentic fantasies’ created to enshrine victimhood.
While Turkish overlords loomed large for their Ottoman subjects hundreds of years ago, President Erdoğan is an important figure for Muslims in Palestine today. Walking into a corner shop in East Jerusalem, I was surprised to be met by the sight of the President of Turkey cupping Obama’s face tenderly on a poster above the till; another poster showed him shouting at an unseen audience, his contorted face crimson with rage, with Arabic script underneath. The images were so ridiculous that I suspected they might be satirical, but when I asked about them, the shopkeeper explained that they showed how Erdoğan both pities Americans and defies them. I judged this a good moment to drop the bombshell: that I am half-Turkish.
‘You? Turkish?! No.’
‘It’s true. I swear on my mother, who is a hundred per cent Turkish.’
A moment of stunned and respectful silence, Then, ‘Come with me’ – the shopkeeper beckoned me to a backroom, and opened the door with a theatrical flourish. A Turkish flag was painted across an alcove.
We love Turkey very, very much.’ The sincerity in his voice was unmistakable. By now, the other shop workers – his sons and nephews – had stopped stacking shelves and gathered round, adding their voices in agreement. When I asked one of his nephews why he liked Erdoğan so much, he said he admired him for berating then-Israeli president Shimon Peres at the Davos forum in 2009 for Israel’s Gaza offensive, while another cited the Mavi Marmara incident as another golden moment, when a Turkish Islamic NGO sent a flotilla of aid ships to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza strip in 2010; nine Turkish activists were killed when Israeli soldiers stormed the ships. As a result, diplomatic relations between the two countries were ruptured until 2016, and are still uneasy. In August 2014, Erdoğan appeared in the last session of parliament before the presidential elections wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh (scarf), an act of solidarity with the victims of the Gaza bombardment.
‘Erdoğan is strong. He is an Islamic leader, like an Ottoman leader,’ insisted the shopkeeper.
‘No,’ said his son, the boring voice of reason. ‘Not as strong as a sultan, Dad. But still strong.’
Other Palestinians I spoke to told me Erdoğan’s popularity was on the wane from the once-feverish pitch after the Mavi Marmara incident; in 2010, posters of his face had been pasted in shops across East Jerusalem and towns all over the West Bank.
Erdoğan invokes his Ottoman predecessors at every opportunity. In July 2017, protests broke out among Palestinians after Israeli authorities introduced new security measures at the al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount. Erdoğan urged Muslims to visit the mosque in defiance of Israeli restrictions, and, with much poetic licence, contrasted Israel’s intolerance with the tolerance shown by the Ottoman sultans to non-Muslim subjects of the empire, pointing out that the empire had ruled over the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, for four centuries: ‘Our ancestors had acted with such great delicacy and sensitivity that it is impossible not to remember them with gratitude and longing given today’s cruelty [in Israel].’ He vowed to defend their conquests with his usual brand of grandiose Islamic fighting talk, stopping short of any actual threat: ‘Let’s defend [Al-Aqsa Mosque] as if we are defending Mecca and Medina.’ After President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, he announced that Turkey would be opening an embassy in East Jerusalem to recognize Palestine’s claim to the city as their capital.
Erdoğan’s attitude to Islam could hardly be more different from that of the founder of the Republic himself. One of Atatürk’s main concerns after establishing the Turkish Republic in 1923 was instilling secularism in the public life of a Muslim population. Looking back at the fall of the empire, and at what Atatürk created out of its ashes, it is tempting to think that this was how Turkey was fated to develop. The historian Banu Turnaoglu has noted that various forms of republicanism were competing in the last century of the empire, however: an Islamic form, a Liberal form and lastly the victorious Kemalist form. The historian Ben Fortna points out that the Liberal vision of a Turkish republic would have accommodated the minorities of the empire in a way that Atatürk’s Republic certainly did not: The Liberals . . . may well have produced an attempt at a decentralized empire that could have afforded a degree of regional autonomy for the main ethno-national groups in the empire, such as the Rum [Greeks] and the Armenians.’47
When I met the historian Menachem Klein in Jerusalem, he was adamant that the demise of the empire ‘killed coexistence. Today, you can see the same [resulting] problems from the Balkans down through Greece to Cyprus and here to Palestine.’ This is, of course, a contentious claim -the empire allowed for coexistence between ethnic and religious groups, but was beset by tensions in its last century, making it more difficult to make comparisons to the nation states that replaced it. Abdul Hamid II imposed stricter Islam on his own people and frustrated the burgeoning reforms which preceded his reign in the 19th century and which would have granted minorities greater freedoms in the dying empire. Just forty years after the Tanzimat reforms ended, a combination of his paranoia and the Great War stopped any future version of Ottoman coexistence in its tracks. The problems that Israel and the Occupied Territories have witnessed in the past century are too complex to be blamed on the collapse of the empire, however, and even towns held up as models of coexistence are not entirely what they seem.
The Hanging Gardens of Haifa
The bus to Haifa was just pulling out of Jerusalem Central Bus Station when I scrambled on board. Young IDF soldiers had already taken all the seats; I found myself in the awkward position of having to sit in the aisle at the top of the emergency exit steps, side by side with an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He sat on his suitcase, opened his Torah and began to pray; I browsed Twitter on my phone, bracing myself to avoid impact at every swerve. At the end of the two-hour journey we exchanged weak smiles as we parted.
Jerusalem is a wearying place; I had been told by several friends who’d visited Israel that Haifa, a town on Israel’s northern coast, is the opposite – laidback, religiously diverse and, very unusually for Israel, famous for its Arab culture. The town was a minor port until the British took it from the Ottomans in 1918 and chose it as a strategic hub for transporting crude oil from the Middle East, making it the most important Mediterranean port north of the Suez Canal. Today it is a picturesque town spread over the slopes of Carmel Hill, and utterly dominated by the Baha’i gardens – ‘The Hanging Gardens of Haifa’ – cascading down the hillside in a series of eighteen terraces comprised of immaculately manicured lawns and flower beds covering 200,000 square metres of land. The gardens are dramatically lit at night; during the day, a small army of gardeners patrol at all times, armed with hoses and clippers, working in respectful silence.
The gardens, and the Baha’i shrine (where I was not allowed to enter, as a non-Baha’i unluckily visiting at the wrong time of day), are a good representation of the minority cultures of Haifa; the Baha’i faith is an offshoot of Islam whose me
mbers have been persecuted as heretics since the religion was founded in 1863 in Iran. There are around 6 million Baha’is in the world today, and Haifa is the centre of their faith, although they are not actually allowed to live here thanks to Israel’s notoriously restrictive residence laws for foreigners (reminiscent of Ottoman rules allowing non-Muslims from outside the empire to visit for a specified period of time only). Instead, Baha’is make a nine-day pilgrimage every nine years, and only the staff of the shrine and attendant buildings stay permanently, with special dispensation from Israeli authorities.
The Ahmadiyya, another relatively niche Islamic sect, came to British-controlled Palestine in the 1920s, specifically to the Kababir area of Haifa, after being persecuted in Sunni-majority Pakistan; Israel is in fact the only place they can practise in the Middle East (their headquarters in Morden, South London, is the biggest mosque in Europe). The Druze are a more long-standing resident community, and, along with Muslim Arabs, make up a significant proportion of the student body of Haifa University. The Druze faith was born in AD 986 in Egypt, from within Islam; they self-identify as ‘Unitarians’, taking elements of religious teachings from all three major Abrahamic religions as well as the Greek philosophers, as I was to discover when I visited some religious sheikhs in southern Lebanon. There are over a million Druze people worldwide, and about 140,000 in Israel, most of them living in the north near the Lebanese border in towns like Haifa.
I heard much more Arabic in Haifa than I did elsewhere in Israel, especially in the music-filled cafés between the lowest slopes of Carmel Hill and the port. One night, I walked to the German Colony, established in 1868 by the German Templars at the foot of Mount Carmel (and now a glamorous district comprised almost entirely of open-air cafés). I sat in a garden festooned with fairy lights outside one of these restaurants, Fattoush, and ordered the eponymous Lebanese salad; as the waitresses bustled past me they talked to each other in Arabic, their voices mingling with the Arabic pop music, a strangely counter-intuitive sound in Israel. A short walk from the German Colony is the famous Wadi Nisnas (‘mongoose valley’), a traditionally Christian area with a market patronized by the full plethora of Haifa residents. As I wandered along the bottom of the Baha’i gardens late one night, I passed the Jewish Arab Culture Centre, proudly displaying three symbols on its facade: a cross, Star of David and Islamic crescent.
