6
ANATOLIA
Eurasia’s Crucible
The history of the great upland mass of Anatolia, like its sister, the Heerweg in northern Europe, has seen peoples, civilizations, cultures and armies go back and forth, fight, create and settle, for as long as human history has known. For many historians Anatolia was Greece. Herodotus, the great Greek historian, was born in Halicarnassos – today’s Bodrum – where Mehmed in 2010 would host a gathering of the Expedition members that laid the groundwork of this book. The great city of Ephesus was just a few hours’ drive ‘down the road’, so to speak. The Expedition’s route would take them through Trabzon (Trapezon) and Samsun (Amisos), and then through Erzurum known to the Greeks as Theodossiopolis and to the Armenians, who once populated much of eastern Anatolia, as Garin. The Silk Road passed through, and so did Alexander. The Selcuks and the Ottomans came back the other way to lay the grounds for Turkey.
It was now 9 August. With help from host Ridvan Mentes, Tim and Roger met up with Tony and Bob to coax Tony’s vehicle out of its bond at the notoriously tetchy Turkish customs. Tim by now knew that the number plates had been wrong since Germany. They did not match the vehicle documents. An attempt to get a carnet de passage from the Turkish Auto Club, and so ease passage through various future customs posts, got nowhere. Both vehicles were registered in Germany with these special ‘export’ number plates. Somehow, the Kombis were released. Then there was no common-sense alternative but, once out of sight of the customs officers, simply to swap the number plates on the vehicles. Duly re-baptized, both vehicles were then taken to VW Service – Tony’s to have a proper engine overhaul and Tim’s to fix the jumping gears. Two days later, nothing had been done to Tim’s, but Tony’s had been fitted with the last two pistons available in Istanbul.
Ridvan Mentes, it later emerged, had to bribe officials in order to ‘correct’ the records, and get Tony’s Kombi released. Ridvan not only eased the way through officialdom, but also entertained and fed everyone royally throughout the stay in Istanbul. When asked what he did for a living, Ridvan shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly, touched his moustache and said – ‘import-export’. You could draw your own conclusions. This was, after all, Istanbul.
A certain Mr Bayazid, known to Mehmed, was the first Turk to go to Cambridge, where he had a very happy time. He helped sell some of the Expedition’s surplus goods for some useful cash. He, too, dealt in import-export, was politically respectable, and very successful.
Tim went fishing one evening with the lawyer who defended Mr Menderes, the ex-Prime Minister of Turkey. Menderes was to be executed just over one month later. At this time, Mehmed’s father, Arif Demirer, was still in jail.
Istanbul continued to enchant. The light across the Bosphorus caught the minarets of both the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia to give a surreal effect of shape and colour. The usual tourist visits to these mosques, as well as the Grand and Spice Bazaars, lived fully up to expectations. The Istanbul market stalls groaned under a great abundance of fresh food. Unlike behind the Iron Curtain, Istanbul then was not the target of mass tourism that it is today. Even less of a magnet for travellers was the great land mass of Anatolia into which the remarkable Kemal Atatürk had consolidated his country, abandoning Istanbul for the new landlocked capital of Ankara, after the debacle of 1918 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Bob felt keenly that Turkey was caught in an impossible situation – and one liable to last for a long time yet. This was – and is – a complex society. No practical solution to its difficulties looked to be on the cards. The intelligentsia was a small group of men and women whose education had been almost entirely European. Probably European governesses had nurtured them while young. They had then been educated in one of Istanbul’s ‘European’ schools or lycées before going abroad to study and become even more firmly fixed in European ways. But the vast majority of the nation (some 80 per cent of it), had never seen the inside of a school; they tilled the land, bred army conscripts, and lived in Anatolia. The rift between these people and the small elite of European-trained intellectuals, or merchants, was enormous. In Turkey (as indeed elsewhere) this upbringing, alien to much of the country’s history, became an obstacle to reform and improvement, even with the strongest will and deepest patriotism. There was indeed the bond of the nation, cemented with a modernized language – both inherited from Atatürk. Many educated Turks had little taste for the plaintive Turkish melodies pouring out of Istanbul taxi radios or tenements, and more for crisp American ‘hot’ tunes. The psychological difference between the two layers of Turkish society erected a high wall. The top layer, one felt, was like a bad piece of skin-grafting that had not taken. One could easily be persuaded that the Istanbul elite was more European than most Europeans further west. The fraught saga of Turkey’s bid to join the European Union is a product – also – of this mismatch of identity.
A short story, in Turkish storyteller’s idiom, about a little girl from Anatolia, gleaned from a conversation in Istanbul, told much:
The little girl from Anatolia cannot read or write. And her eyes are distorted. She approaches the table hesitantly, hardly daring to look at the faces she is to serve. The vague chaos of her world intimidates her – all those people with clever faces and fine tongue. Yet their words differ little from those spoken to her before she left for the great city where the houses touch the clouds, where machines clatter through crowded streets. In the big, cool house slim, benevolent ladies would correct her with a fleeting frown when she performed her small tasks properly. As she approaches the table she hesitates as if the 20 faltering paces from the kitchen to the table carried her into a different world mysteriously evoked by the elders of her lowly village.
Her mistress had sent her to another, more lowly gentleman who tried to teach her the strange symbols these people put on paper which were painted over the walls of the great city. The gentleman rarely smiled as his pen moved from sign to another and the little girl tried to follow.
She recalled how the brown-skinned mullah in her village had made signs on paper for the boys of the village. How could she, with her misformed eyes, which the lady had promised to have cured by a great doctor, dare to share the secrets of the mullah, the clever boys and the clever gentleman?
The meal over she approached the lady and waited a small distance away until she should be noticed. The lady turned and beckoned her to speak. The little girl whispered: ‘Please, Madame, what shall I do now?’ ‘Go and play with little Aysha,’ said the lady. The little girl from Anatolia walked timidly down the garden between the clipped flower beds to be a playmate – or a toy?
One day back in the village she had fallen and struck her head upon a stone. A spear of pain jabbed across the back of her eyes and she sobbed while her body lay across the stone. Two men grumbled and picked her up. The flame flashed suddenly to white heat and darkness fell more quickly than it had ever fallen before. She woke as if thrust out of a deep well into daylight, revolving as she rose. Two strong hands held her head and two eyes penetrated hers but she could not fix her gaze upon them, try as she would. The head of the man shook slowly and deliberately, then turned to utter a few words to half visible figures in the dim background: ‘her eyes will not serve her well.’
Now in the great city the same chaos bubbled behind her eyes. The great doctor had come, as the lady had promised, to look at the little girl’s eyes. After a while he rose. ‘I cannot mend those eyes. And even less can I look beyond those eyes and mend the gap between the two worlds in which she lives.’
The thread of the storyteller’s tale would come to mind during the weeks ahead while travelling through the fastnesses of Anatolia and Persia.
*
Turkey is one of the few countries visited by the Expedition that has much to boast of in the last century. But it has been a hard ride. Its current spreading of wings is fraught with risk. Two of the Expedition members have close ties with Turkey: Mehmed, of course, because it is his native country, where he is active politically and economically; Bob was the European Commission’s man in Ankara for four years at a crucial point in Turkey’s modern history. In 1961–2, Mehmed’s father was languishing in prison, following the military coup which threw him and colleagues out of government. In September 1980, Bob and Mehmed were in Ankara when the Turkish military struck again amidst growing anarchy. Only in September 2010, following a referendum, was much of the generals’ real and constitutional power contained. Turkey enters the new century a much-changed and more self-confident country than was evident in 1961. Why, many ask, is Turkey asserting itself? Bloody-mindedness towards a Europe that drags its feet over Turkey’s potential membership of the club? A ‘neo-Ottoman’ vocation in its key geopolitical situation? Or just a refusal to be kicked around in great power war-games where NATO took for granted a plentiful supply of Turkish conscript bayonets? None of these theories suffice for a country with a proud history and proven capacity to reject defeat. Mehmed wrote in the Cambridge University student weekly Varsity in 1960 under the title ‘Where Is Turkey Anyway?’: ‘Turkey is neither European nor Asian. She will remain what she has always been, a bridge between the two. And she will continue to be proud of this.’ One of Bob’s Turkish local staff, an educated Istanbulite, said of his native city: ‘It’s being overrun by Anatolia.’ The same guy, after a traineeship in Brussels, said about young Greeks he had met there, ‘They’re the same as us!’ Two truths and realities which, paradoxically, could contain the seeds of a greater regional sobering-up – if the politicians let it be so.
*
It was time for the Expedition to move on. With the help of American fellow-travellers from the Balkans, Dolores and Howard, depleted provisions were restocked at the Istanbul American PX – then a goldmine for fancy and other US goods accessible to Europeans by invitation only. Both Kombis left Istanbul in the early evening after a splendid lunch at the home of the Mentes family, who escorted the little convoy to the Ankara road. Before dawn, camp was set up outside Ankara, the capital city. Mrs Demirer – Mehmed’s mother – could not be found.
It was a hot day in mid-August. The endless Anatolian plains baked in brown remoteness ahead. A cool beer fortified the sense of endeavour before tackling the long haul over mountains behind the Black Sea to Samsun. Roads of uncertain surface quality spiralled ahead. Soon there was a nasty noise from the front of Kombi Z1060, now ‘re-baptized’ with the registration number of ‘Tim’s’ Kombi. A shock absorber had come loose. Three men on a rope took two hours to pull it on again.
The road took a turn for the better. The countryside was the wildest yet seen, with great plains giving way to bare mountains and ultimately hills of many different hues of green before dropping to the coast. Mountain villages with flat-roofed, stone-built houses provided solid refuge for the inhabitants against the notorious storms rushing out of the Black Sea and the harsh Anatolian winter.
The road grew worse, the shock absorber now decided to slip off the other way. Tim tied it up out of the way with string. For the Kombis, like real pack animals, there was a lot of laborious climbing on a twisty, gravel-surfaced road. Finally, a halt was called in the early hours of the morning on top of a mountain and a tent rigged up between the two Kombis. The sun allowed little sleep. Tim bought some washers for the Kombi in Samsun, a town with shops full of useful commodities, and with them fixed up the shock absorber. This repair, as luck would have it, would work perfectly all the way to Teheran. The empty road went in a straight line along the flat littoral, with fertile land and with ample water all around to feed the abundant produce it yielded.
By this time Kombi Z1235 had forged well ahead of Tim and Roger. At one point Tim and Roger noticed some rather bad skid marks round a corner. They found out later that this was another of novice driver Bob’s efforts– the first being a gentle collision with the behind of a grumpy donkey in Ankara. Both Kombis were now playing a sort of involuntary cat-and-mouse game.
The littoral receded and the road began to wind along the shore. Supper was in the only restaurant in Ordu. Camp was set up for the night by the shore.
Roger and Tim were up and away by dawn. A lovely excursion inland followed, then back to the twisty coast road. There were heartstopping moments when lorries came at full pelt round corners, where there was just room for them alone, and forced the Kombi into the ditch. Turkish lorries frequently carried the painted sign ‘Masallah’ above their windscreens as a charm of trust in the protection of the Almighty against disaster when driving against all odds of survival, particularly around blind corners or over hilltops. Asked what the sign meant, one driver answered, ‘This is a bloody good lorry!’
Arriving in Trabzon mid-morning, a search for the Atatürk Museum proved fruitless; no one seemed to know where it was. Instead, a big US Air Force base emerged around a bend. From Trabzon the route continued to Erzurum; the coastal mountains were almost alpine, the road splendidly engineered through the challenging terrain. Along the way were small, compact towns with bright paintwork and the occasional Roman bridge against the backdrop of a fine vista. They reached Bayburt in the early evening. This was supposed to be the meeting point with the other Kombi. It was nowhere to be seen. Camp was set up for the night on a haulage site with the sidelights left on, in case the others came along.
Most crops had already been harvested, but farmers were still busy. Threshing the grain crop was still done in the old style using an ox roped to a beam and trudging round in circles. Nut and fruit crops were spread on the ground by the side of the road to dry in the sun. Mechanical implements were few and far between.
Enquiries the next day in Bayburt revealed that the other Kombi had left for Erzurum the previous night. That would be it until Tabriz. To Erzurum the road followed the flat plain between smooth hills with few trees in sight. The underside of an oil tanker provided welcome shade for a quick lunch. Erzurum was obviously a big centre for the military. Now it was broiling hot in mid-summer glare. In winter the temperature could drop to minus 30 degrees and lower; sentries at barrack gates were changed every 15 minutes to prevent them from freezing to death. After Erzurum a chance meeting with some of Tim’s friends from Christ’s College, Cambridge driving from Karachi to London in a Land Rover, elicited dire warnings about how terrible the road was in Iran. A puncture shortly after leaving Agri meant putting back a spare tyre which already had a slow puncture. It was time to pull off the road and camp at the foot of Mount Ararat, just before the frontier town of Doğubayazit, to wait for daylight.
Meanwhile, near Bayburt, for the other Kombi carrying Tony, Peter and Bob the evening meal nearly ended in ‘alcoholic disaster’. In the smallest of chow houses on the main road and only street a mad cook rustled up steak in two minutes flat to a half-drunk waiter wearing a wide, floppy Turkish cap like his other clients. They were all very excited by the odd arrival of these creatures from afar and the hand and the neat black moustache of the waiter gave frequent twitches of pleasure. In the ordinary downtown Turkish restaurant the menu was limited so no one bothered to write it down. You merely walked in, reserved yourself a seat and then strolled into the kitchen to see what was cooking. A brief consultation, grimaces and gesticulations ensued and then you returned to your seat for a beer. The cordial waiter friend retired into a small cubbyhole behind a low table, frowned and then disappeared for two minutes. He returned, smiled, and left his new guests to quietly separate the fiery peppers from the salad. They hoped that no one was watching too closely as they did so. One pepper needed at least four bottles of beer to accompany it, for the Westerner at least, as the tongue temperature experienced a rapid rise after these pernicious little white things had done their worst.
The door flew open and in came the fellow from the place down the road with fresh beer in the usual unlabelled bottles. Meanwhile, our friendly waiter had helped himself to another slug of the cause of his cheerfulness – Yeni Raki 45 – the Turks’ favourite anis-based drink, whitened sparingly with water. He then splashed raki into the glasses of the foreign guests but added beer instead of the customary water. Bob and Tony exchanged a brief, doubtful glance without changing the polite smiles on their faces and clinked glasses with the happy waiter. Cigarettes were exchanged and more raki appeared. The situation began to grow serious. Peter made steering wheel gesticulations with his hands and excused himself on the grounds that he was driving. At the same time, a grandly moustachioed gentleman, who appeared to be something like the local constable, walked in, eased his not inconsiderable weight into a chair besides some of the locals and occupied the waiter’s attention as he took his evening few to fortify himself for the night’s beat. Tony, Bob and Peter prepared to take off, but one more glass of Anatolian firewater had first to be consumed and with handshakes all round they swiftly but tactfully managed to get out onto the street, amused but relieved. As they drove out of town, a fairground shrieked and grunted noisily. Only men were actually on the swings – the women sat packed like sardines on benches, with just their eyes showing through their chador.
The border was now close. Convoys of military lorries and jeeps passed; camps were frequent. Turkey then had 1.5 million men under arms. Persians and Turks, from the Seljuks down to the Byzantines before them, had more often than not been at each other’s throats. The border had ping-ponged back and forth a few times. And the Red Army, too, was just up the road.
Roger set the alarm for dawn to take photos of Mount Ararat. It was cloudy for once – a good excuse to go gratefully back to sleep again. There was better luck later. With its upper mantle of snow and attendant cloud the mountain looked timeless.
But it must have looked different when Noah was around, what with all that swirling water. Then, after driving over a slight ridge, there was Iran. At the Turkish/Iranian border it emerged that the others had spent the night in the ‘Border Hotel’ and had just passed through. ‘Not very intelligent,’ grumbled Tim, who still had the wrong vehicle number in his passport. One person could not take two cars into Iran. This threw up a documentation hitch at customs on the Turkish side – this Kombi had the ‘wrong’ engine and chassis number. On the Iranian side, Tim had to declare that he was ‘driving the vehicle out of Iran’ before they would let anybody in. Various imprecise written undertakings finally did the trick and the barrier into Iran was duly raised.
The first 12 miles ran alongside a dried-up river valley and then across a wide, arid plain. The road surface was reasonable and as long as one kept moving the heat was bearable. Every so often there was a small township built round a spring. The buildings were one storey of mud and straw and formed into one mass by tall walls of the same material. A few trees to provide shade for all and sundry made the whole scene into a blurred hotchpotch of colour from a distance. The plain looked like shifting sand, having the same wave-like formation, but actually was quite permanent. The rivers that flowed in winter and spring cut deep gullies in the otherwise uniform terrain.
On leaving the last town before Tabriz a soldier blocked the way for what looked at first like a security check. ‘Could you take my sergeant into Tabriz?’ ‘Well yes.’ Then in jumped two soldiers. ‘Oh no you don’t!’ There was nothing for it but to adjourn to the nearby cafe for chai. Suddenly, two goats and half a dozen chickens materialized. These were also travelling to Tabriz. ‘Oh well, tie them on the roofrack.’ A soldier climbed up on top and lashed the goats down. The chickens were quiescent, having been carried around head downwards. The Kombi groaned with this additional load and set off with all aboard. Soon a stomping noise was heard from the roof; on leaning out, Tim saw that the billy-goat had cast off his lashings and was standing facing forward with an expression of disgust on his face. This, it appeared, was how he liked to travel, so the journey was completed with him walking about on the roof. The poor chickens were almost flattened by the wind across the roof of the travelling Kombi and had to be brought inside, where they lay in a motionless heap.
Soon the lights of Tabriz beckoned. A tour of the streets looking for the others ended up in the garden of a hotel where they were found drinking cokes with four Australians. After food and a shower, an hour was passed talking with an Armenian engineer who built barracks for the Iranian army. According to him, the Americans and the English were equally disliked. As for the Iranians, said he contemptuously, and short-sightedly – they were ‘donkeys’.
It was Roger’s 21st birthday – celebrated in Tabriz with a coke.