From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium. William Dalrymple
Rolex watches (fake), Lacoste socks (fake), Ray-Ban sunglasses (also fake) and Bic cigarette lighters (apparently genuine, but of the poorest quality). I buy a Coke and it turns out to be a fake too: tastes of warm deodorant.
Halfway through the voyage another fearsome-looking headscarf-and-raincoat lady appears at the top of the stairwell and begins to harangue us all. I assume she is telling us to vote Refah, or ticking off those few middle-aged women who are not wearing a veil. But I’m quite wrong. Her daughter is in hospital and she needs money for medicine. The passengers give generously, especially the old labourer with the open flies, who extinguishes his cigarette to dig deep in his pockets.
The Byzantines used Prinkipo as a prison, and exiled a succession of crooked chancellors and plotting princes to its monasteries. The Ottomans turned it into a summer resort, and so it remains: a thin line of lovely slatted wooden houses, with carved balustrades and lattices, prettily painted in cream and light blue. But the site of one of the old monasteries is still an active shrine, and it was there that I was heading. Fr. Dimitrios had told me about it. The Shrine of St George was an example, he said, of something which was once common, but is now rare: a holy place sacred to both faiths, where Greeks and Turks still pray side by side.
Because of a local by-law cars are banned from the island, so at the jetty I hailed an old horse-drawn phaeton. We trotted along the cobbles, up the hill, with gardens and orchards on either side. Apples and apricots hung heavily on the trees; bougainvillaea and jasmine blossomed over orchard walls.
A century ago Prinkipo was exclusively Greek, and today one or two old Hellenes still cling on to their houses: large, ostentatious wooden buildings with pediments and pillars. Occasionally, as we passed the manicured lawns, we caught glimpses of old Greek women sitting in the shade of magnolia trees with shiny green leaves and thick creamy flowers; some were sewing, others sipping glasses of sherbet.
We drove out of the town and up the mountain; pine forests replaced orchards and thick carpets of pine needles rotted in the wheel-ruts. Other than the clip-clop of the horse and the rattle of other phaetons taking farmers and pilgrims back into town, it was completely silent.
After twenty minutes, the driver dropped me beside a graveyard at the bottom of the dusty path leading up to the shrine. Before climbing the hill, I looked inside. It was the last Greek graveyard in Turkey still in use. I wandered through the unkempt memorials, overgrown and unswept, carpeted now, like the road outside, by a thick muffling of pine needles. Many of the headstones were decorated with photographs. Paradoxically, I found that it was these photographs of dead people from a deserted graveyard which, more than anything else, brought to life the world of the Greek Istanbul which had been ended by the 1955 riots.
Fr. Dimitrios had described those who had left – the Greeks who formed such an influential minority in the Istanbul of the nineteenth century – as cosmopolitan, artistic and well educated; but the photographs, less nostalgic, revealed a prosperous petit-bourgeois society of shopkeepers and spinsters: moustaches and double chins, waistcoats and fob watches, bald spots and pincesnez; line upon line of plump, suspicious men, grown prematurely old in their confectionery shops, moustaches bristling in late Ottoman indignation; pairs of old ladies shrouded in funereal black, plain and bitter, all widows’ weeds and pious scowls.
Walking up the hill, among the ebb and flow of pilgrims, I marvelled at what I took to be thick white hibiscus blossom on the bushes near the summit. Only when I reached the top did I see what it really was: on every bush the pilgrims had tied strips of cloth, primitive fertility charms, to the branches. Some were quite elaborate: small cloth hammocks supporting stones or pebbles or small pinches of pine needles. Others were tangled cat’s-cradles of threads wrapped right around the bushes, as if packaged for the post.
Inside the shrine it was just as bizarre. At some stage a fire had half-gutted the building, leaving charred rafters and singed window frames standing in the open air. But the rooms, though half exposed and quite unrestored, were filled by a continuous trickle of supplicants. The two nationalities were praying side by side; but they were not praying together. The Greeks stood in front of the icon of the mounted saint, hands cupped in prayer. The Turks put prayer carpets on the floor and bent forward in the direction of Mecca. One veiled Muslim lady scraped with long nails at a tattered nineteenth-century fresco of the saint, then with her fingertip touched a fragment of the paintwork to her tongue.
‘The Muslims also believe in St George,’ explained a young Greek student I met waiting by the jetty half an hour later. ‘They hear St George is working miracles so they come here and ask him for babies. Maybe they don’t know he is Greek.’
‘They probably think he is Turkish,’ said her friend.
‘Probably,’ said the first girl. ‘They think everything is Turkish. I’ve heard boys say Haghia Sophia and the Hippodrome were built by the Seljuk Turks.’
‘They don’t know history,’ agreed the second girl. ‘One day some boy asked my sister, “Why did you Greeks come here? All you do is make trouble.” She said, “We didn’t come: you did.’“
‘They even think Homer was one of them,’ sighed the first girl. ‘They say he was a Turk and that his real name was Omar.’
ISTANBUL, 1 AUGUST
11 p.m.: I have just returned from supper with Hugh Pope, Turkey correspondent of the Independent. We ate in a fish restaurant at Bebek, five miles up the Bosphorus, overlooking Asia. Talk soon turned to the Kurdish war currently raging in the southeast.
‘At least fifty people are being killed every day,’ he said. ‘Unless at least two hundred are gunned down, I don’t even bother calling the Foreign Desk.’
Hugh told me that the previous December, when the Independent sent him to Diyarbakir, he managed to get through to the largest of the surviving Syrian Orthodox monasteries in the southeast, Mar Gabriel. The day before he arrived, a lorry had hit an anti-tank mine two hundred metres from the monastery’s front gate. As he drove up, the charred corpse of the driver was still sitting in the burned-out skeleton of the truck, hands welded to the wheel. The mine had apparently been placed by the PKK, the Revolutionary Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and was thought to have been aimed at village guards – in the eyes of the PKK, collaborators with the Turkish government – passing on their way to the neighbouring village of Güngören. Although the mine’s target did not seem to have been the monastery, it dramatically brought home to the monks how vulnerable they were to being caught in the crossfire between the PKK and the government.
According to Hugh, the Kurdish guerrillas dislike the Suriani Christians as much as the local government does, accusing them of being informers, just as the authorities accuse them of being PKK sympathisers. Moreover, the Kurds have much to gain by driving the Suriani out: they can then occupy their land and farm it themselves.
Yet the problems faced by the Christians and the Kurds have similar roots. The Ottoman Empire was administered by a system which allowed, and indeed thrived on, diversity. Each millet or religious community was internally self-governing, with its own laws and courts. The new Turkey of Ataturk went to the opposite extreme: uniformity was all. The vast majority of Greeks were expelled, and those who remained had to become Turks, at least in name. The same went for the Kurds. Officially they do not exist. Their language and their songs were banned until very recently; in official documents and news broadcasts they are still described as ‘Mountain Turks’.
It is this ludicrous – and deeply repressive – fiction that has led to the current guerrilla war. Because of it the rebels of the PKK are now involved in a hopeless struggle to try and gain autonomy for the Turkish Kurds, something Ankara will never allow. More than ten thousand people have been killed in the south-east of Turkey in the last five years, and great tracts of land and around eight hundred villages have been laid waste in an effort to isolate and starve out the guerrillas. At least 150,000 Turkish troops are tied down in the mountains of the south-east, fighting perhaps ten thousand PKK guerrillas. At the moment the government seems to have the upper hand, and it is said the average life expectancy of a guerrilla is now less than six months. Hugh