Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
the morning I was to leave Antioch, the Sehoglu family invited me to their house for breakfast. It was early, and Mrs Sehoglu was sleeping in. Kemal Sehoglu, Aboush, Mehmet and I sat around the family dining table for an early morning feast of tea, eggs, goat cheese, fresh yohurt, olives, hot Turkish bread and orange juice, served by a young Arab girl who wore a tight, dark dress and a thick, gold necklace. Kemal Sehoglu and I discussed the reasons why there were no Arabic schools, books or newspapers in Hatay.
“You must remember,” he advised me, “they do not teach Turkish in Syria or Bulgaria, where many Turks live. Perhaps ten per cent of Syrians are of Turkish origin, but they cannot study Turkish.” He asked the girl in Arabic to give me more tea, telling me, “I learned Arabic in the villages, but I forget.” He proceeded to speak to me in Arabic, slowly so I could understand much of it, for fifteen minutes.
The Sehoglus found a driver, who assured them he spoke Arabic, to take me to Samandag, near the Roman port of Seleucia Pieria. According to Aboush, Samandag was a disappointing attempt to create a tourist resort. Its beaches were covered in tar, and the only hotel had become a barracks. The main reason it failed, he said, was the opposition of local smugglers who thought tourism would inhibit their business activities. “There are also sharks,” he added. I thanked the Sehoglus for their kindness to a stranger and gave Aboush a copy I had borrowed of A History of Antioch in Syria from Seleucus to the Arab Conquest. The book said that Mark Antony and Cleopatra came to Antioch in 37 BC and that Antony’s gift to his Egyptian lover was all of Syria and Palestine, land that would be given to and taken from many people in the centuries that followed. Cleopatra lost it after six years. A map in the book showed an unbroken Roman road along the coast from Alexandretta into Palestine. In our time, the coast road ended in the brush just south of Arsuz. It began again at Samandag, and there were many borders between there and Sinai, at least one of them impassable.
As we drove out of Antioch, dark clouds crept over the mountains and rain began to pour. A few miles outside the city, the road to Samandag became a gravel path which wound through small farming villages and fields of barley. After nearly twenty miles of slow driving, during which I discovered the driver knew only a few words of Arabic, we approached the coast. There we found “Samandag,. Pop. 27,300.” Samandag was as ugly as the countryside was beautiful. The main road through the city, which we followed in the direction of signs pointing to the Plaj, was lined with petrol stations, garages, timber-mills and car parts shops separated at intervals by small orange groves and a bridge over a stream.
In the centre of Samandag, there stood another statue of Atatürk, this time in tails and cape. Larger than life, he was doffing his top hat with his right hand like a magician ready to produce a rabbit. Past the main square towards the beach were scores of new, single-storey houses, square and unornamented. The closer we came to the sea, the older the houses became, most of them red or white stucco cottages, a few with second storeys and small vine-covered terraces.
We reached the shabby seafront to find it much as Aboush had described. We could see neither the smugglers nor the sharks, but there were a few fishermen using dynamite, tar-covered sands and an abandoned, rusting motel. Waves washed the deserted beach, where a few small boats waited empty for fishermen to take them out. In the great campaign to resist the rising tide of tourism, Samandag was winning.
The Roman ruins of Seleucia Pieria were a few miles to the north at Cevlik, where the ancient foundations of stone piers stretched from the shore and disappeared in the surf. Here the Orontes flowed into the sea, its deposits over the centuries filling the ancient harbour so that, by the time the Arabs arrived in the seventh century, it was barely usable. Modern Cevlik was a dull seafront village with a few commercial buildings, a post-office shack and a camp ground near a new, little-used marina. I walked through a long passageway cut through the rock which the guide books said was a Roman aqueduct built by the Emperor Vespasian. Without water, it seemed more like a coastal defence which allowed soldiers to move without being seen from the sea.
Disappointed with Samandag, with Cevlik and with the ruins, I asked the driver to take me to the border. Rain was still coming down when we made our way back through Samandag. Suddenly, just beyond the town, a police car drove in front of us and ordered the driver to stop. When he got out to talk to the two uniformed policemen, I remained in the front seat of the car reading a book. I was still reading when one of the policemen tapped on my window.
He spoke to me in Turkish, but the only word I could understand was “passport.” I handed him my passport, and he took it to his colleague in the police car who appeared to read my passport details over the radio. The driver and the two policemen resumed talking, and I went back to reading. About ten minutes later, another police car arrived. The officers inside were dressed somewhat differently from the first two. Perhaps they were more senior. They spoke for a little while to the other policemen, and one of them walked over to me. He spoke to me in Turkish, but I said nothing. He called the driver, who made a pretence of translating my Arabic into Turkish.
They went back to the two police cars, spoke on the radios and conferred among themselves. All of them looked solemn. I went back to reading. Another ten minutes or so passed, and I slowly became afraid that, for reasons I might never understand, I would be arrested in this lonely southeast corner of Turkey. The longer I waited, the more difficult it became to read. I stared at the pages, hoping the police inquiry would end quickly. A few more minutes and one of the policemen marched to my window. Would he arrest me for treading through Vespasian’s aqueduct or venturing through the failed tourist resort of Samandag?
He tapped again on the window and reached into his pocket. I looked into his face, wondering what he meant to do. He stared back at me. Then he handed me my passport without saying a word. As we left Samandag, I relaxed.
I learned much later that after my departure the police in Antioch had interrogated some of the people who met me there. The same thing would happen in Syria.
It was early afternoon when we reached the riverside village of Cilvegözü, which gave its name to the border post. Cilvegözü was little more than a hamlet of small farmers, who derived additional income from the smuggling which began as soon as the border was laid next to it in 1939. In the late 1970s, most of the smuggling was of consumer goods from Syria into Turkey. With Syria’s chronic shortages in the 1980s of foreign exchange and simple consumer items like cooking oil and washing powder, the traffic in household goods was going the other way.
The flow of drugs had also reversed itself. Before the opium eradication programme in Turkey and the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, the drugs had gone from Turkey, often by truck, hidden in bags of cement, through Syria to Lebanon. In Lebanon, the opium was processed and exported by air, sea or land. The opium was now grown in Lebanon and sent through Syria and Turkey on its way to growing markets in Europe and America. Perhaps the destruction wreaked by the heroin repaid the West in some small part for the harm done by all the weapons it had poured into the Levant. Evil for evil. At night, for a price, a shepherd or farmer from Cilvegözü and other villages on both sides of the frontier would guide a smuggler over the mountains across a border which for them was little more than a source of profit.
For the traveller, the border crossing at Cilvegözü, like all the other border crossings in the Levant, was a nuisance designed to cause him maximum inconvenience. Cars were not allowed to carry passengers to the customs and immigration buildings, so young boys were waiting near the car park outside the border post to carry luggage. One of them wrested my two bags from me and carried them the hundred yards to the modern immigration post. Inside the tidy office, there was an orderly queue of only three men waiting to present their passports to the border policeman seated behind the counter. The policeman wrote down the details of each passport in a large ledger. He asked questions, wrote down answers and asked for other documentation, while each man in turn searched his pockets for the right bit of paper. Processing each traveller took fifteen minutes, and I waited patiently while other border policemen strolled nonchalantly behind the counter, apparently with nothing to do.
When my turn came, the policeman took my passport, looked at it and stood without saying a word. He walked to a telephone in another part of the room, spoke for several minutes, apparently making references in Turkish to my passport, and then returned to his desk. He noted