Sample of writing

Preface

The most exalted seat in the world is the saddle of a swift horse & the best companion for all time is a book. El Mutanabbi, quoted by Gertrude Bell in Nazlı’s Guestbook, undated but probably July 1907 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the artist, archaeologist and statesman Osman Hamdi Bey was a leading light in Constantinople society.

The coming of the Turkish Republic cast a shadow over all things Ottoman, but in 2004 the sale of his painting The Tortoise Trainer, for what was then a record-breaking sum for a Turkish artwork, signalled a revived interest in him. So when an Istanbul museum showcased the contents of his daughter Nazlı’s guestbook, I was eager to find out what famous names might be lurking between its covers. To my surprise, my eyes alighted on the autograph of Gertrude Bell, best known of a band of British ‘desert queens’ famous for exploring the Levant in the years before the First World War.

Born into a wealthy family of industrialists from the northeast of England in 1868, Gertrude travelled extensively in the territories that are now Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Saudi Arabia between 1905 and 1914. When war broke out, her pioneering adventures in little-known areas of the Middle East elevated her from amateur archaeologist and traveller to go-to expert, the only woman in a group of British former explorers with experience of the region’s complex tribal politics. After the war she settled in Baghdad where she came to be associated with the crude ‘lines in the sand’ used to conjure nation-states from the territory of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Later she would wet-nurse the inexperienced Saudi-born Prince Faisal as he made his stumbling first steps as ruler of the newly created Iraq. Gertrude’s, then, is a name more commonly associated with deserts than Aegean beaches, and, accordingly, for Nazlı’s guestbook she selected a quotation from a revered Iraqi poet. But its presence there set me thinking. To have visited Osman Hamdi at home suggested a more than passing acquaintance with his family, which in turn implied a more than passing acquaintance with what was at that time still Constantinople. Curiosity piqued, I turned to her letters and diaries and quickly learned that between 1889 and 1914 she had visited what is now the Republic of Turkey on at least eleven occasions. Between 1889 and 1899 a sequence of short trips had taken her to Constantinople, Bursa and Smyrna, as well as to the famous archaeological sites of Troy and Ephesus. In 1902 she spent a month exploring Smyrna and its hinterland, the experience marking, in Turkish terms, the turning point between Gertrude the tourist and Gertrude the explorer. That transition was completed in 1905 when she arrived in Turkey not in the relative comfort of ship or train but astride a horse, riding into Antakya (Hatay) from Aleppo on her way back from Syria and Palestine. Two years later Turkey itself formed the sole focus of a four-month overland expedition from Smyrna to Binbirkilise, a remote cluster of early Byzantine churches in the heart of Anatolia. Then in 1909 she rode into Cizre and across Turkey at the end of a long expedition through Syria and Iraq. Two years later and the border town of Nusaybin served as her entry point at the tail end of another months-long journey into Iraq and Syria. A premature farewell to Constantinople came in 1914 when she paused there briefly on her way home from a fraught expedition into what is now Saudi Arabia. Despite these many visits and the fact that she had met both her friend and colleague Lawrence of Arabia, and the great love of her life, Dick Doughty-Wylie, there, Gertrude’s time in Turkey has been largely overlooked. Yet the story was always hiding in plain sight. Her journeys had resulted in two books – The Thousand and One Churches and The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur Abdin – that were wholly about Turkey, and another three – Persian Pictures, The Desert and the Sown, and Amurath to Amurath – in which it played a walk-on role. Pieces of the story cropped up in volumes of her letters published by her stepmother, Florence Bell, and her sister, Elsa Richmond. A sequence of articles on Cilicia and Lycaonia also appeared in the Revue Archéologique. The snag lay in the absence of one single book that pulled together all the threads. Plenty of foreign men had traversed the Turkey of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and published accounts of their adventures. Gertrude was perhaps the only Western woman to have done the same thing at the same time, yet it wasn’t until Newcastle University placed her archive online that the scattered pieces finally came together to reveal just how extensively she had travelled within the country, sometimes in the footsteps of renowned scholar-explorers such as Sir William Ramsay, sometimes – as in the Tur Abdin, where it can sometimes feel as if she has just walked out of the room – breaking new ground of her own. Her diaries revealed her climbing mountains (Cudi and Hasan) and rafting a river (the Tigris); they described her ventures in places as disparate as pre-Blue Cruise Bodrum and the Karaca Dağı, a region so remote that it is barely mapped even today; and they showed her at Binbirkilise, rolling up her sleeves as the first Western woman to dig for the past in the Anatolian countryside. Her letters oozed the gossip of late-Ottoman society. Her photographs immortalized all but inaccessible Byzantine ruins, some since lost to storm, quarrying or dynamite. They live on, rather touchingly, on the computer screens of local planning officers, cherished as the first known images of their domains. The kernel of an idea began to seed itself. Cautiously, I marked onto a map all the places that she had visited on her different journeys. Then I joined the dots and stood back to admire an itinerary that kicked off easily in the comfort of Istanbul, then tracked down to Izmir on the Aegean coast before sweeping east across the heart of the country to dusty, neglected Cizre on the Syrian border and doubling back west to Istanbul via the basalt-walled stronghold of old Diyarbakır. Gertrude had ticked off archaeological sites as well known as Sardis and Aphrodisias and as forgotten as Blaundos and Larissa; places as easily accessible as Konya and Eskişehir and as hard to reach as the Syriac monastery of Mor Augen. By amalgamating all her journeys and then retracing them, I hoped to find out how much had changed in Turkey and how much had stayed the same. Boarding a bus out of Izmir in April 2015, I could never have imagined the casual way that politics would upend my plans as a mid-June election triggered the collapse of a peace process between the government and the Kurds. Turkey went into a tailspin. As I journeyed steadily further from the safe, tourist-favoured west coast towards the embattled southeast, the country’s troubled past started to snap at the heels of its unhappy present. Only by keeping a low profile (and perhaps being a woman) could I keep going. Most of my travel took place in 2015, but because of the fragile situation on the Syrian border I researched the Karkamış chapter first, in 2014, even though fighting in Kobani was underway. The ascent of Hasan Dağı had to await suitable weather conditions and was carried out belatedly in 2016. Pat Yale Istanbul, 2022

PART ONE Western Wanderings

1 The First East

‘Hooooo.’ It’s a sound to make the hairs on your neck stand on end. An unearthly sound, inhuman, dredged, it seems, from deep within the soul. To attempt to render it in words is futile not least because its nearest English equivalent is the sound made by a child playing ghosts in a bedsheet, which would be to inject a wholly inappropriate suggestion of levity into something quintessentially solemn. Better, perhaps, to think of the haunting ‘woo’ made by an owl crying out in the night. Yet in Arabic there is no such transliteration problem. In Arabic the ‘hoo’ sound is a word that can be rendered as ‘hu’. This ‘hu’ is the equivalent of the upper-case He of Christianity. But of course this He is not the Christian God but the Muslim Allah, and the elevation of the word into this spine-tingling sound speaks as profoundly of faith as that of a chorister’s voice echoing around the vaults of a Gothic cathedral. I’ve come to watch a troupe of whirling dervishes go through their paces in one of the waiting rooms at Istanbul’s Sirkeci Station. It’s a majestic, high-ceilinged space, the sort of space that was commonplace in the days before functionality and the need to remember heating bills eclipsed beauty in the design stakes. The lemony light filtering through the stained-glass windows above the quintet of elderly musicians only adds to the sense of this being a secular cathedral, a paean in stone to the glories of modern transportation. Beneath the windows the musicians warm up their audience before the dervishes begin to rotate, their snow-white skirts, lifted by gravity, undulating around them as they rehearse a routine in which every step is ritualized and meaningful, and only the blood red of the rug carefully spread on the floor at the start of the performance then ceremonially gathered up again at the end injects any semblance of colour. Up swing the skirts, offering glimpses of white long johns, then back they drop again, twisting tightly around the dancers’ legs before coming to rest again when they pause for a break. Those swirling skirts stir a breeze in the hall. It flickers across my ankles as I sit waiting for the eerie howl that I know will conclude the proceedings. * On a spring day in 1889 a young woman stepped ashore from the steamer that had brought her down the Black Sea coast from Constanza in Romania to the harbour of Constantinople. As her foot touched the cobbles, she took care to lift her skirt to prevent it from trailing in the dust, then raised a hand to her head to check that her hat had survived disembarkation. That young woman was to become the famous Gertrude Bell, archaeologist, writer and traveller extraordinaire, the woman who would turn herself into the kingmaker of Iraq and help delineate the boundaries of the modern Middle East. In the early May of 1889, though, she was merely Miss Bell, an unusually self-confident twenty-year-old tourist taking time out after sailing through a first-class degree in history at Oxford in the days when the university declined to grant their diplomas to even its most brilliant female students. Gertrude had been born into one of the six richest families in Britain, her family’s wealth the product of the great iron, steel and chemical empire created by her grandfather, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell. The visit to Constantinople was not her first foray overseas, but it did offer her a first thrilling glimpse of the Orient, where the haunting lilt of the muezzin’s call, the nostril-assailing pungency of the rubbish-strewn streets and the crush of what sometimes seemed like all of humanity squeezed into the same place at the same time turned a page in a mental book hitherto focused on Europe, bringing the rest of the world leaping suddenly to life in all its vibrant variety. Given the role that the Islamic world was to play in her life, it’s ironic that Gertrude’s first trip to Constantinople was a last-minute add-on to a more organized stay in Bucharest. A year earlier, the abrupt conclusion to years of study had left her rudderless. So when her uncle, the British Minister to Romania, invited her to waltz away the winter beneath Bucharest chandeliers she jumped at the opportunity. In the eyes of relatives, who had hoped it would rid her of her ‘Oxfordy manner’, that winter break had had a serious matrimonial purpose to it, and disappointment at its failure to throw up any suitor more promising than her blue-eyed cousin Billy might have been gnawing away at the back of her mind as the ship steamed down the Bosphorus to moor in Galata (now Karaköy). But as soon as it docked, all such thoughts would have evaporated. In the harbour tall ships with complex rigging jostled sailing boats with dhow-shaped lateens while a flotilla of gondola-like caiques darted in and out, their oarsmen bawling for customers. It was a first intoxicating glimpse of the East that must have been all but overwhelming for a young woman unaccustomed to frequenting so much as a Kensington art gallery unchaperoned. As Billy and their new friend, the Times journalist Valentine (‘Domnul’) Chirol, stepped ashore beside her, Gertrude would have been swallowed up in a multi-coloured throng. Her eyes would have flickered over a sea of red fezzes as men crowded around her, pushing and shoving. Amid the crush she would have glimpsed the hamals, the porters struggling from the boats bent double beneath luggage; the simit-sellers, their trays of sesame-covered bread rings looped like quoits over wooden poles; the şerbet vendors bearing flasks of sugary drinks; the ragged dilencis, the beggars with their twisted limbs and whining voices; and the ubiquitous street curs, ‘light yellow with longish rough hair’, as she wrote home to her sister. Spinning round, she would have been transfixed by the vista of Sarayburnu, the historic peninsula topped with Hagia Sophia, the Topkapı Palace and the Sultanahmet Cami, its rollercoaster silhouette of domes and minarets little changed to this day. Then Domnul would have been steering her into the Customs House, where she could smoke a cigarette while their bags were assembled and checked, and a horse and carriage procured to bear them up to Pera, the modern quarter on the hill above the harbour that had evolved to accommodate the city’s European residents. They were heading for the Royal Hotel (on the Rue des Petits-Champs, today’s Meşrutiyet Caddesi), which stood cheek by jowl with stately Pera House, then home to the British Embassy. The Royal was one of a cluster of new hotels to have sprung up in the space cleared by a conflagration twenty years earlier and it was in its plush and no doubt aspidistra-filled interior that she, Domnul and Billy would have put their heads together to plan their tour of the city. * Three years later, Gertrude returned to Constantinople on the Orient Express. I imagine her striding along the platform at Sirkeci Station, a young woman with green eyes and auburn hair, the chubby cheeks of college days newly streamlined to reveal a pointed nose and chin; a straight-backed woman of middling height whose love of fur and feathers played up a fragile prettiness that would not outlive the flattery of youth. No doubt that young Gertrude would have been thinking only of the mosques, palaces and bazaars dangled in front of her by her Murray’s guidebook. Yet ahead of her lay a life of extraordinary accomplishment. For Gertrude was the consummate over-achiever who had only to set her sights on something for it to become success. This was a woman who would mature into so adept a linguist that she would translate the Persian poet Hafiz’s Divan into English; so accomplished a mountaineer that a peak in the Swiss Alps would be named after her; such an expert in the little-known minutiae of Middle Eastern tribal politics that the British government would call on her services during the First World War. Later in life she would go on to found the Iraq Museum. By the time of her death she was so well known that her passing was announced in the House of Commons. From a historian’s point of view, Gertrude’s most endearing characteristic was an addiction to putting pen to paper. Notes, letters, diaries, books, articles – hardly a day went by when she didn’t pour her experiences onto the page as enthusiastically as any hyper-active blogger of today. From those scribblings we sense a youth spent in restless pursuit of a purpose. Rich, clever and successful she might have been, yet hand-in-glove with the public achievements went serial disappointments in her private life: love affairs that came to nothing, an enthusiasm for family that did not translate into starting one of her own. As I drain a glass of wine in the Orient Express Restaurant, I’m painfully conscious that I’m about to set off to retrace the footsteps of a woman whose life almost certainly ended in lonely Baghdad suicide.

***

By the late nineteenth century enough adventurous travellers were finding their way to Constantinople for an embryonic tourist trail to be emerging. Already there was a tick-list of places that all good visitors had to see, and top of that list, then as now, was Ayasofya. Ayasofya had started life as a monumental Christian church, Hagia Sophia, the Church of Divine Wisdom, the present incarnation being the third church to occupy the site, its predecessors having succumbed to fire and riot. The third church was commissioned by the Byzantine emperor, Justinian, and for almost a thousand years it was revered as the greatest church in Christendom. But in 1453 the fall of the Byzantine Empire changed everything: after a six-week siege Mehmed the Conqueror cantered into the church, reined in his horse in front of the altar and commandeered the building for Islam. The youthful Mehmed decreed that the church should be converted into a mosque, and for the next five hundred years Hagia Sophia became Ayasofya (the Turkicized version of its name), its smoothly domed silhouette forever transformed by four flanking minarets from which the muezzin could call the faithful to prayer. For the wide-eyed young Gertrude, St Sophia was ‘the glory of Christendom … the place of memories’, but on her first visit in 1889 not only was it serving as a mosque but it was also Ramadan and she was able to witness one of the holiest days in the Islamic calendar there. On Kadir Gecesi (Laylat al-Qadr), the Night of Predestination, Allah is believed to have entrusted the first verses of the Koran to the Prophet Mohammed and angels are believed to descend from heaven carrying with them his plans for the coming year. All night long the faithful flock to the mosques to pray. From a vantage point in the western gallery once reserved for Byzantine noblewomen Gertrude gazed down through a shimmer of oil lamps as men prostrated themselves on carpets spread before the mihrab. ‘The preacher’s voice rolls out … through arches and galleries and domes,’ she wrote. ‘“God is the Light!” reads the preacher. “God is the Light!” repeats a praying nation, and falls with a sound like thunder, prostrate before His name.’ Since then, history has taken another turn. Convinced that it was the Ottoman Empire’s failure to modernize that had led to its demise, and determined to secularize his new republic, Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had Ayasofya decommissioned as a mosque. No longer could Christians or Muslims worship in it; the great church-mosque was to become a museum. Now, daily armies of tourists pour over the rutted threshold of the Imperial Gate once reserved for the emperor. I yearn to share their enthusiasm, to gaze up at the dome that was for so many centuries the largest in the world with reverence, but the selfie-sticks that have replaced the conquerors’ swords are an irritant. Ditto the wall of scaffolding elbowing its way into the nave. It took less than six years to build the church, but it’s taken more than three times as long as that not to complete its restoration. To refresh the experience I’ve enlisted the help of Trici Venola, a forthright, Los Angeles-born graphic artist and high-school-history dropout, who came to Turkey in 1999, fell under the spell of Byzantium and has made it the work of her later life to sketch every last crumbling window-frame in greedy detail. Trici has no time for the irksome present; like a wife blind to her ageing husband’s paunch, she still sees Hagia Sophia as it was in its Byzantine heyday. Straightaway she leads me to the end of the southern gallery where what looks from a distance like a group of portrait paintings dissolves, as we near it, into thousands of tiny glittering tesserae, mosaic depictions of the Empress Zoe and the last of her three husbands paying homage to Christ. The daughter of Constantine VIII, Zoe (c.978-1050) lived a life as colourful as the mosaics: betrothed to a Holy Roman Emperor, who expired before the nuptials could take place; belated marriage to a cousin; suspicion of involvement in his murder; remarriage to a likely co-conspirator; exile to the Princes’ Islands; return to reign as joint empress with her sister, Theodora; third and final marriage at an age when most of her contemporaries were dozing in the Byzantine equivalent of bath chairs. Scrutiny of the mosaics reveals that the male head has been tweaked several times as artists rushed to revise the spousal image. Trici gazes at Zoe with an affection born of long acquaintance. ‘People say that she was ugly, but really she was lovely right into old age. You can even see that she was wearing make-up. She ended up queening it over all of them.’ But the trump cards up Trici’s sleeve are the hidden crosses. In Zoe’s day Hagia Sophia was a place of prayer sanctified by a thousand crosses: on the walls, on the columns, on the doors. Today they would seem to have vanished as completely as the Christian worshippers and it takes an artist’s eye to see differently. For the crosses are not quite as lost as it might appear, and the way to find them is to spend hour upon meticulous hour with sketchpad in hand, looking, seeking, seeing. In the women’s gallery our fingers trace indentations once filled with jewel-encrusted crosses levered out by looters either in 1204 when the Fourth Crusaders laid waste to the church or in 1453 in the three days of looting permitted before Sultan Mehmed called a halt. On the balustrade overlooking the nave seemingly simple decorations conceal more crosses, hatching indicating where the arms were prised out to leave just the stems. There are crosses on the back of the Gates of Heaven and Hell. There are crosses peeking from under the ceiling frescoes. There are crosses on the plinths of the pillars. There are even crosses etched into the columns, crosses we can only find by running our hands up and down them like blind women reading braille. As we amble out through the great bronze door sequestered from a Hellenistic temple in Tarsus (more crosses, of course), I realize that I’ve barely noticed the crowds nor felt the need to glower at the scaffolding. Through Trici’s eyes I’ve recovered some of the sense of wonder felt by Gertrude when she first stepped inside Hagia Sophia more than a hundred years ago.* * Ramadan, the month of dawn-to-dusk fasting, is the time when Islam most manifests itself to outsiders, and for a young woman born in the north of England and with almost no prior knowledge of the religion to have arrived in Constantinople just then must have been life-changingly revelatory. ‘Not only is every true believer forbidden to eat during the prescribed hours, but nothing of any kind may pass his lips; he may drink nothing, he may not smoke,’ she wrote in her first published book, Persian Pictures, adding that these rules … fall heavily upon the poorer classes who alone preserve them faithfully. Porters carrying immense loads up and down the steep streets of Pera and Galata, caiquejis rowing backwards and forwards under the hot sun across the Golden Horn and the swift current of the Bosphorus, owners of small shops standing in narrow, stuffy streets and surrounded by smells which would take the heart out of any man – all these not one drop of water, not one whiff of tobacco, refreshes or comforts during the weary hours of daylight. But alongside the deprivation she also witnessed the anticipation preceding iftar, the communal lighting of cigarettes and sipping of water that marked the end of the day’s deprivation: The tables in front of the coffee-shops are set out with bottles of lemon-water and of syrups, with rows and rows of water-pipes, and round them cluster groups of men, thirstily awaiting the end of the fast … [Then] the sunset-gun booms out over the town, shaking minarets and towers as the sound rushes from hill to hill, shaking the patient, silent people into life. At once the smoke of tobacco rises an incense into the evening air, the nargilehs begin to gurgle merrily, the smoke of cigarettes floats over every group at the street corners, the very hamal pauses under his load as he passes down the hills and lights the little roll of tobacco which he carries all ready in the rags about his waist. Then, with the eating and drinking out of the way, it was time for the exuberant night-becomes-day festivities. From that hour until dawn time passes gaily in Constantinople, and especially in Stamboul, the Turkish quarter. The inhabitants are afoot, the mosques are crowded with worshippers, the coffee-shops are full of men eating, drinking, smoking, and listening to songs and to the tales of story-tellers. The whole city is bright with twinkling lamps; the carved platforms round the minarets … are hung with lights, and, slung on wires between them, sentences from the Koran blaze out in tiny lamps against the blackness of the night. In the Grand Bazaar, Ramadan even incommoded shoppers: ‘all the sleepy old Turks were undoing their bales of carpets looking as if they had had a tremendous night of feasting, and had rather an ache of the head after it’. The visit was, in any case, a daunting experience: ‘the crowds jostle you, the shopkeepers, throwing aside Oriental dignity, run after you and catch you by the sleeve, offering to show you Manchester cottons and coarse embroidered muslins’. Elbowing my way through the congested alleys of the modern bazaar, I glimpse her ahead of me, bargaining for rugs and rose essence, running a hand over porcelain and silk. Importunate shopkeepers are kept at bay by the swish of a skirt and an imperious glare. * The Constantinople of around one million inhabitants that greeted Gertrude in 1889 was the faltering capital of the Ottoman Empire, its glory days under the Mehmeds, Selims and Süleymans all but forgotten as its problems multiplied. The monuments of the great architect Sinan still harked back to the days when the Ottomans were feared and respected in equal part, but by now they had become something of a mockery, sticking-plasters of tile and marble obscuring a reality of potholed streets, ramshackle housing and poverty-stricken people. Already Tsar Nicholas I had coined the humiliating ‘Sick Man of Europe’ nickname to describe an empire so in hock to the Western powers that an office to administer taxes that would go straight to paying off its debts to them loomed over the waterfront at Eminönü. One by one the outer provinces were shearing off from the periphery, sending waves of destitute refugees pouring into the city to jam the courtyards of the mosques. Presiding over this dismal situation was a sultan very much for the times. Abdülhamid II had succeeded to the throne in 1876, replacing his brother, Murad V, who had been deposed on the grounds of insanity after a reign of only ninety-three days. Their uncle, Sultan Abdülaziz, had died in mysterious circumstances, perhaps at his own hand, perhaps at that of another. Not altogether surprisingly, Abdülhamid was consumed with paranoia and had retreated uphill from the waterside Dolmabahçe Palace to the more readily defensible Yıldız Palace, which was ringed with walls and undercut with tunnels – the architects who had designed it were said to have been executed to prevent them from revealing the plans. It had taken the new sultan a mere two years to dispense with the constitution imposed on him at his accession and he had neutralized the modernizing grand vizier, Midhad Paşa, by exiling him to the outer reaches of Arabia. But while Abdülhamid certainly had reason to fear some of the politicians still surrounding him, this was a sultan who saw enemies even in his own people. It was impossible for him to completely avoid appearing in public, but such unwelcome occasions had been whittled down to little more than the weekly Selamlıks, when he would venture out from the palace to take part in Friday prayers. Gertrude struck lucky with the sultan, hurrying down to the Galata Bridge to watch him process over it in his carriage on his way to the abandoned Topkapı Palace, a ritual performed at the mid-point of Ramadan when his role as caliph required him to pay homage there to the Prophet’s robe and standard. The man she glimpsed through the crowd was already middle-aged, his pinched and wary face dominated by darkly watchful eyes and a Black Sea beak of a nose. The caliph of all Islam he might be, and the man who held at least theoretical sway over the deserts through which she was later to travel, but, like all the sultans since his grandfather, the reformist Mahmud II, he was dressed not in romantic kaftan and turban but in prosaic frock coat and trousers. ‘I expect he shivered with fright the whole time,’ she wrote with the casual callousness of youth.