10

Empire

In the summer of 1914, a group of village boys kicked a ball along the road, shouting and sending up puffs of dust. They moved in a pack, chasing a donkey and cart along the road, jostling at the village well to take long drinks of water, slowing down only when the sun began to wane.

Muzafer Sherif was one of them. As usual, he’d discarded the leather sandals that marked him out as wealthier than the other boys, the sons of his father’s tenants. When the camel caravans passed through Ödemiş — an Anatolian market town in the Aegean region — on their way from Egypt, the drivers stopped at their favourite tea house. It would have been a typical Turkish establishment, with a large tree outside that kept the interior of the wooden building dim and cool even during the hottest part of the day.

While the men sat inside with glasses of tea, the boys, led by Muzafer, sneaked behind the building where the camels were resting and restrung their ropes. When the drivers returned and the camels stood again, they were not tied in single file but every which way. It was chaos. The men shouted, and a few ran from the square, looking for the culprits. But the boys were gone, racing through the narrow streets, and I pictured them gasping with laughter and exhilaration.

The next time, the drivers left one man behind to hide and keep watch while they had their tea. Muzafer and the other boys were in the middle of retying the camels when the drivers — tough men used to fighting off bandits and thieves — charged towards them, yelling and waving their knives. In the shouting and confusion, the boys scattered — all except for Muzafer, who, caught between two camels grunting and kicking in fear, was knocked to the ground. He lay unconscious in the dust, and when he came to, he was surrounded by the furious camel drivers. I don’t know how he got away; perhaps one of the other boys ran to Muzafer’s home and got his father, who was also the town’s mayor, to hurry to his son’s rescue.

Fifty years later in America, Sherif had a brain scan following a stroke, and his doctors were mystified to see evidence in his X-rays of serious head trauma. It was then that his wife, Carolyn, recalled the story about him being kicked by a camel. Sue Sherif, their daughter, told me this anecdote. Sue wasn’t able to tell me a lot more about her father’s early years in Turkey because he didn’t like to talk about it. But she gave me what she could: snippets of his childhood, the name of the village where he was born. Muzafer was born in the summer of 1905 in a mountain village above Ödemiş called Bozdağ after the mountain range’s highest peak.

The taxi driver dropped me off on the edge of Bozdağ, at the one hotel, which was closed. Brown leaves lay on the bottom of the swimming pool in inches of muddy-looking water. Except for a tractor that chugged down the centre of the street, trailing a cloud of diesel fumes, the place was empty. Under the shade of the awning, a small strip of village shops displayed their wares. Straw brooms poked out of a bucket; earthenware pots were stacked on a table covered with a chequered plastic cloth.

On every side, the mountains rose above the red-tiled roofs. It was September 2015, early autumn, and between tourist seasons. The summer rush was over, although the shop in the main street still had brightly coloured beach balls for sale, hanging in a string bag, for swimming excursions to nearby Lake Gölcük. It was a warm afternoon, and the winter season — when the village turns into a ski resort for locals — seemed a long way off.

I had no more than a few words of Turkish, and I had worried about how I’d get by in the country, especially further away from Istanbul. But I’d negotiated a fair price with Osman, the taxi driver, and he kept up a steady stream of conversation in Turkish as he drove across the valley and up into the mountains. He pointed out the window at the countryside as he drove, the blue eye amulet swinging wildly from the rear-view mirror, and I smiled and nodded from the back seat as if I understood.

Strings of chillis hung in pretty red loops against a stone wall; latticed wooden balconies threw lacy shadows. I felt optimistic, convinced suddenly that I would do more than just get by here. I had done as much reading and preparation as I could before I arrived, and even though I’d found next to nothing in English about Bozdağ, I knew enough to see that this sloping street, lined with ancient stone houses and terracotta roofs, would have looked exactly the same when Sherif was a boy.

Under the blue awning, a small group of men looked up from their game of backgammon as I drew close. One of them stood up and rushed over to talk. ‘Where are you from?’ he called in raspy smoker’s voice as he approached. He had a cloth cap pushed back jauntily on his head, and a thick white moustache.

‘Australia,’ I called back.

He nodded confidently. ‘Sydney? Perth? Darwin? I’ve been to all of them,’ he said proudly. ‘I was a sailor. I went all over the world.’ He dragged on a cigarette. ‘You like Turkey?’

I nodded enthusiastically.

‘What are you doing in Bozdağ?’ he said, tipping his head to one side.

I hesitated. Was he old enough to have known Muzafer Sherif or his family? ‘I heard it was a pretty place,’ I answered eventually.

He shrugged and looked up and down the empty street, then back at me.

‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked, trying to calculate his age. But the sun had turned his skin leathery and brown, and it was hard to guess.

‘No, no,’ he said, flapping the hand with the cigarette in it at me, as if the idea was preposterous. ‘I am visiting my cousin.’ He gestured towards the players at the table. One of the men called something to him and he muttered back. He threw away his cigarette. ‘Have a safe journey!’ he said, and strolled back to the backgammon table and took his seat again.

I’d decided to keep the fact that I was a writer to myself. Otherwise it meant I had to check in at the police station of every village and town I visited. But I could see now the problem with that plan. It was difficult to have genuine conversations with people if I lied about what I was doing here.

I wandered down the street and stopped in the centre of the village, outside the mosque, and squinted up at a statue of what looked like a soldier in baggy shorts and black boots, holding a rifle and gazing off at the mountains. Beside him, there was a large framed black-and-white photo of Mustafa Kemal, bareheaded and in what looked like a tuxedo, who peered seriously out at me from under the splash of red, the Turkish flag. I was trying to figure out the relationship between the two of them when I heard the toot of a horn, and Osman’s taxi rolled to a stop beside me.

Osman was impatient with my desire to walk through the small village. Clearly, for him, the attraction of the place was the mountain itself. He followed the road up a steeply wooded mountainside, where he passed through large iron gates and then parked in a clearing beside some dilapidated picnic tables and a small tea house set up under the trees.

A cool breeze came off the mountain peak above, but it was invisible behind the forest of oak and pine trees. Mount Bozdağ was capped with snow year round, and back when Sherif was a boy, enterprising locals had climbed the peak and brought back pieces of ice wrapped in felt that they sold for refrigeration. Two miles above sea level, the 2,000-metre-tall chain of mountains had been a magnet in summer for wealthy Levantine families wanting to escape the heat of the plains. They arrived with their servants and camels loaded with tents and furniture, food and utensils, for a season of hiking, blackberry picking, picnics in the forest, and boating on Lake Gölcük.

The mountains were also a great hiding place for local brigands or outlaws. The sultan’s authority only extended so far. When Sherif was young, groups of armed bandits, or Zeybeks, lived in these mountains, beyond the reach of law and order. They thundered down the mountains on horseback to rob traders, kidnap for ransom, or demand protection money from those in passing caravans. It was a great place to hide. One local brigand named Charkirge had a price on his head for kidnapping and holding wealthy hostages for ransom. The summer Muzafer was born, the Levantine community holidaying in the mountain resort were panicked by rumours that Charkirge, frustrated by the birth of yet another daughter, was planning with his followers to kidnap and keep a baby boy. The rumours panicked a missionary family who were holidaying nearby, and in particular the new mother, who was recuperating in the mountains after the birth of her son. In her memoirs, she recalls how she appeased Charkirge by taking gifts to his wife and hosting a lavish picnic on the mountain in their honour.

The owner of the tea house insisted I climb up into a kind of treehouse, furnished with cushions and a low table, and brought me tea in a small glass rimmed with gold. He and Osman settled at a table in the shade below, and the smell of their cigarettes drifted on the breeze. It was quiet except for the rustle of the wind and the low gurgle of a nearby spring.

Yet soon the tea house owner was back, gesturing at me to follow him. Past the picnic tables, he pointed at an ancient chestnut tree, which, a sign beside it told me, was 20 metres high and 3 metres in diameter. I ran my hand over the trunk, feeling for carved initials. The tea-house owner showed me a pipe that gushed mountain water, encouraging me to cup my hands and take a drink of water so cold it made my teeth ache. As a boy, Muzafer would have drunk from this same stream, thirsty from games of hide and seek when he was little, after hikes or horserides up the mountain with his brothers as he got older. In spring, the floor of the forest was carpeted with yellow, white, and blue crocuses. The trees threw a welcome shade, where he would have been able to sit on a bed of soft pine needles when he got tired. How long was his childhood peaceful, I wondered; at what age did he become conscious of the violence that was never far away?

The year Sherif was born, there was widespread revolt supported by the Committee of Union and Progress, or the Young Turks, against the sultan’s unjust taxes. Three years later, the Young Turks led a revolution, restored the Ottoman constitution of 1879, introduced a multi-party political system, and ended Sultan Abdülhamid’s thirty-year autocratic rule, replacing him with his younger brother, who was little more than a figurehead. But the euphoria — the Muslims, Christians, and Jews celebrating and dancing in the streets — did not last long.

Ödemiş felt like a metropolis after Bozdağ. Due to the upcoming election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s face, ubiquitous as it had been in Istanbul, loomed from the side of buildings or from billboards by the highway. The wide tree-lined main street, with its imposing stone buildings built in the early years of the Republic, was lined with restaurants and grocery stores. Cars roared, motorcycles buzzed. Osman dropped me a block from my hotel, and I paused at a café with a large shaded terrace and thought about having a cold beer. It looked like the sort of place that would serve alcohol, but perhaps secularism was losing its grip here in this Kemalist stronghold too. No one else seemed to be drinking alcohol, so I returned to my hotel.

One of Muzafer’s brothers, a lawyer and prison reformer and, later, chief magistrate and mayor of the town, had established a museum of his own on the edge of Ödemiş, housing a collection of more than 16,000 artefacts from the area that he acquired through his lifetime. But the museum looked like a building site; a security guard shook his head at me through the locked iron gates. A harassed-looking woman came out to tell me the place was undergoing renovation and was closed.

The clerk at my hotel, a modern high-rise that seemed set up for Turkish businessmen, handed over my key with a curt nod. I had the feeling he was wondering what I was doing in Ödemiş. It had been a frequent question from shopkeepers since I arrived three days ago. The man behind the counter at the local grocery store had said bluntly, ‘There’s nothing for tourists here. You should be at Ephesus.’ It came across as unfriendly, unwelcoming. It was not a comfortable feeling, and I was beginning — irrationally, I knew — to dislike the place.

Muzafer Sherif’s father, a member of an emerging Muslim bourgeoisie, moved his family from Bozdağ down to the plain to Ödemiş when Muzafer was small. Here he acted as a broker between local farmers and British traders (the British had brought the railway line in 1884) and organised the sale and transport of tobacco and cotton to nearby Smyrna for export abroad. Muzafer’s grandparents lived in the medieval village of Birgi, famous for its silk production and its Islamic scholars, where his grandfather was a teacher. In the town of Ödemiş, Muzafer’s family was relatively affluent, with servants to do the housework and tenants to work the land. Later, Muzafer’s oldest brother would serve as town mayor.

It was the Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor of Ödemiş, with his passion for the town’s history, who was one of the main organisers of a symposium in honour of Muzafer Sherif in 2013. But by then no one in Turkey remembered what Sherif looked like, and the organisers mistakenly chose a photograph of social psychologist Solomon Asch for the printed program and projected Asch’s image onto the wall during the ceremonies. In the audience, few other than Sherif’s daughters, visiting from America, noticed the error. ‘That’s not Daddy!’ they whispered to each other, debating whether to say something. In the end, they decided it didn’t matter and stayed quiet. Sherif would have been enraged, especially given that he credited himself with inspiring Asch’s interest in social psychology and later came to regard him as a rival. After the symposium, the mayor of Ödemiş snipped a ribbon at the entrance of a small street in the old part of town and announced that it was now named Muzafer Sherif Street.

But the clerk at the front desk of my hotel couldn’t help me find Muzafer Sherif Street. Like me, he checked Google Maps, so I knew he wasn’t going to have any better luck. He tried a few spelling variations, then looked up and shook his head. He typed something into his laptop and swivelled the screen around for me to see. Ödemiş had a city museum that he was urging me to visit.

The local cultural museum was a two-storey eighteenth-century wooden inn with the rooms arranged around a central courtyard. The fourteen rooms on the upper and lower floors had room after room dedicated to local culture, leading citizens, and their business ventures. In the women’s quarters, in the dowry room, a Singer sewing machine stood ready, and mannequins modelled ornately embroidered wedding gowns. In the male rooms, life-size dioramas showed local businessmen going about their daily life in rooms decorated as their shops — the local clockmaker squinted down through his eyeglass into the innards of a watch, the barber sharpened a razor, the shoemaker fashioned leather.

Tuğba the archivist, a slight woman with a mass of dark curls and large glasses who was clearly very proud of the museum, took me upstairs and showed me a small glass cabinet in the corner of a hallway. Tuğba’s English was rusty and my Turkish was nil, but I understood from her that this display was the result of the commemorative event for Sherif held back in 2013. On display inside were four of Sherif’s books, which looked measly in comparison to the dioramas celebrating the town’s other residents.

I told Tuğba I was looking for the street in Ödemiş that was named after Sherif, and she consulted a book and came back with a slip of paper in her hand, offering to call me a taxi to take me there.

On the street she handed the driver a piece of paper and gave him directions. He looked at the address, shot her questions, and then opened the door doubtfully. ‘He will take you,’ Tuğba said confidently.

But soon we were lost. The driver stopped at a shop to ask directions, then at a shoemaker’s stand, under a striped canvas awning on the footpath. Finally he stopped at what looked like a car park, where a sad-faced man got up from his desk and came out to inspect me through the window of the cab, then pointed across the street.

It was a long street, lined with low stone houses hidden behind high walls. The taxi driver stopped at a pink-washed wall with a blue door, the branches of an olive tree spilling down over it. He pointed at the house, then down at the paper Tuğba had given him. I walked to the corner, looking for the sign, but there was none. No wonder no one knew where the street was. Further along, the old houses petered out, and it widened into a quiet roadway that stretched away to the distant mountains.

It definitely wasn’t the same place that I’d seen in the photos of the opening ceremony. In the pictures, the mayor was lined up with a row of dignitaries at the entrance of a small and crowded street beside the blue-and-white sign bearing Sherif’s name. But it didn’t matter. The house in this unmarked road must have been his childhood home. Whether it was a language miscommunication, or perhaps because Tuğba knew that the street named in his honour was gone, as I later found, she had pointed me to this simple house, a fragment of Sherif’s past. I wandered up and down for a while, taking photos.

It seemed strange that the commemorative street had disappeared. But then I remembered the election of the new mayor, who was from Erdoğan’s AKP party. Was it a simple matter of a new incumbent in the mayoral office staking his claim? Or was it part of something larger, the obliteration of reminders of those who supported Kemalism and the founding of the secular Republic? It wasn’t until later that I learned this wasn’t the first time Sherif had been sidelined by the winds of politics in Turkey.

Perhaps there was no single event, no one moment where Muzafer Sherif’s childhood was snatched away from him. From the age of six he lived in an empire, and then a country, that was constantly at war: beginning with the Italo–Turkish War in Libya in 1911, to the Balkan Wars from 1912 to 1913, to World War I from 1914 to 1918, and then to the War of Independence, which lasted from 1919 to 1922.

As a typical child of the late Ottoman Empire, Muzafer grew up playing games, reading books, and listening to his mother’s stories of trickster Nasreddin Hodja. At school he learned how to read and write Arabic and to recite the Qur’an. But slowly, those wars that had until then seemed remote, just the mutterings of his father and uncles at the tea house, would have come into sharp focus and thrust themselves into his consciousness.

Across the Ottoman Empire, rising nationalisms were dissolving loyalty to the sultan, which had previously united the melting pot of different ethnic religious and cultural groups in Anatolia. Mistrust between Ottoman Greeks and Turks surged after Greece declared war on the Empire during the Balkan Wars, and after the Empire’s humiliating loss of the prized city of Salonica in 1912. Beginning in 1913, the Ottomans began the forcible expulsion of Greeks and, later, Armenians, who had lived in the area for generations and whose family history, language, memories, and loyalty were bound up in their town and neighbourhoods, but were now regarded as traitors. As part of a government push, they were driven out of their homes and businesses or rounded up, their properties looted, their churches destroyed. In the winter of 1916, when Muzafer was ten years old, the town crier, accompanied by a small boy beating a drum, made his way through the streets of Ödemiş in a flurry of snow, announcing the edict that began with an account of the subversion and treachery of the Armenians and ended with the news of their deportation. Five days later, amid terrible lamentations and wailing, 1,500 Armenian families and their possessions were loaded onto donkey and oxen carts. Under the escort of gendarmes, they were marched out of Muzafer’s home town.

But almost as soon as the familiar faces of neighbours, shopkeepers, and friends disappeared, a wave of strangers arrived to take their place. Anatolia was engulfed after the Balkans War, with almost half a million refugees arriving between 1913 and 1918.

From what I saw at the Ödemiş cultural museum, any reference to local Greeks and Armenians, who had been part of the area’s culture for centuries, had been edited out of the story of the town. In much the same way local Armenian churches have been converted into mosques, the museum told a story about the town that ignored uncomfortable truths.

In villages and towns across Anatolia, differences that had been submerged by generations of intermarriage, the practicalities of business relationships, and the interdependence of neighbours suddenly resurfaced. Friends and neighbours who had lived in the same area for generations now viewed one another through the prism of religion and politics.

History books describe these dramatic changes, and some memoirs by leading writers such as Halide Edib and Irfan Orga touch on them, but none can tell me specifically what villagers and townspeople in places like Bozdağ or Ödemiş thought of what was happening: if they supported the expulsions or if they felt outraged or ashamed. So we can only guess that people such as Muzafer and his family, who counted Greek and Armenians among their employees, shopkeepers, neighbours, and friends would have felt. They would probably have been torn between violent love for their country and hatred of traitors, and affection and fellow feeling for their community members. For some, patriotism won out every time. Others remained conflicted and troubled, and spent a lifetime trying to make sense of it. Many simply tried to forget.

For Ottoman children, this seismic shift in loyalties was reflected in school readers. In Muzafer’s first couple of years at school, before 1913, students learned an idealised version of the Ottoman Empire, built on unity, equality, and cooperation among people from a wide variety of ethnic and religious communities. At the same time, Turks were presented as superior for having established the Ottoman government, for having the longest history defending the Empire, and for being the largest and most powerful group in its borders:

These sacred lands, on which various ethnic groups and elements like the Turks, Arabs, Albanians, Bosnians, Kurds, Laz people, Georgians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Bulgarians live with a language and are unified under a common benefit are called homeland. The composition of these elements living under the same rule are called “nation” (millet). This homeland is Ottoman; our common nation is the Ottoman nation … love your homeland and nation much more than your life, and live proudly under the honorable Ottoman flag.

Instead of playing games, patriotic schoolchildren, like Muzafer and his brothers, were expected to practise military skills so as to prepare for adult military service. It was without question that they would engage in the defence of their homeland.

After 1913, Muzafer’s schoolbooks told a dramatically different story. The Empire had lost more than half of its territories in the Balkan Wars. Traumatised by these losses, the Young Turks, in their nation-building, organised history lessons in primary schools that emphasised a break with the past. Schoolbooks exhorted the new generation of nationalists to mourn the loss of the lands of the Empire, to protect its territories, and to seek retaliation against those ethnic groups who had betrayed them. These texts did not censor or protect children from stories of brutality and trauma. Now many of the cultural and ethnic groups that had been encouraged to rally together under the Ottoman flag were traitors, as the passages made clear:

They behaved like worms inside us. They joined our foreign enemies. They took ¾ of our motherland and wounded our dear mother. They killed thousands of, hundred thousands of suckling babies, raped our women, and, these monsters even raped our little girls. Turkish child! Remember these enemies who were previously worms, and who transformed into snakes now. The blood of your grandfathers is shouting: “Turkish child! Take your revenge!” Do not ever forget the words Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian and those who want to behave like them!

Increasingly, with war, the battle for new territories, and rising nationalisms in both Greek and Turkey, the classification of Ottoman subjects according to race and religion gained new power. The ties that bound the multiethnic groups were unravelling. The question of which group you belonged to — Armenian, Greek, Turkish, Jewish, Christian, Muslim — was no longer straightforward. How did you identify yourself? Whose side were you on?

In 1914, when he was nine, Sherif’s school closed its doors — like so many during World War I. For his mother, Emine, keeping an eye on five children with no school to occupy them would have been a worry.

For Muzafer, no school would have meant freedom and a chance to explore. He must have been a cocky and adventurous boy. One day, he and a friend set out for Smyrna, 60 miles away; it was too far to walk so I imagine they caught an occasional ride on a donkey cart, following the railroad track for 60 miles until they reached the city.

It’s easy to see why a boy from a small market town would dream of an adventure in Smyrna. It faced outward, to the sea, towards Europe on one side and Asia on the other. Behind it, the hinterland, which included Ödemiş, seemed a world away. Smyrna was known as the ‘insolent’ city: the town’s valis, local governors, were often men who had been banished from Constantinople for their opposition to the sultan. Inhabitants of the city were skilled at circumventing the sultan’s strictures and enjoyed religious and economic freedoms not at all typical of the rest of the Empire. Even the local newspaper was careful in its reporting of the city’s social activities to avoid angering the sultan. Its tolerant atmosphere and prosperity was a contrast to other, war-ravaged parts of the country. On Smyrna’s streets, traditional Ottoman subjects wore turbans, fashionable Turks wore the fez, Greeks wore flat-brimmed caps, and Americans favoured broad-brimmed straw hats. Baggy Zeybek–style pants were banned: at the railway station, men queued to hire European–style trousers for their visit to the city. People who considered themselves sophisticated eschewed Turkish and spoke Greek and French.

Above the cries of sherbet and fruit sellers shouting their wares, Greeks yelling over games of cards through the open doorways of cafés, the ever-present barking of dogs, and the sputter and roar of motorcars, the bells of St Photinia, taller than the minarets of the mosques, rang out across the city at the same time as the call to prayer.

On Frank Street, bakery windows were full of French cakes. Muslim women wore transparent veils or no veils at all, and close-fitting clothes that showed their figures. At Bon Marché and Petit Louvre department stores, young women entered iron-grilled elevators that took them upstairs to be fitted in the latest fashions copied from French and American magazines. But although the city’s tolerance of diverse religions, cultures, and nationalities might have been part of its charm and was the secret of its wealth, it was also part of its downfall.

The Kordon, the long street that ran along the quay, with its marble-fronted houses facing the water, was crowded with camel trains loaded with cargo. Some caravans travelled with as many as 1,500 camels, bringing in Eastern luxuries — carpets and rugs, silk and cotton, baskets full of lemons — and taking back Western goods — sacks of spices, watches and clocks, Singer sewing machines. The bay bristled with ships and sailing boats, steamboats and caïques. As night fell, the traders packed up and the quay became a promenade. The pale marble façades of the buildings glowed against the night sky. The cafés below lit up, and music floated out across the water as far as whichever battleship was moored out there — a fusion of Greek and Turkish music they called rebetiko. Wharf workers, tough men who hauled sacks and carried heavy loads all day, played cards with sailors who had come ashore for the night. Above them, on the café walls, hung portraits of the Greek king and queen.

This mixing and intermingling — of languages, religion, and culture — was likely heady stuff for a curious mind. To nine-year-old Muzafer, Smyrna was still a magical place.

But his happy wandering through the streets with his friend that day was cut short. He was grabbed from behind by his uncle, a doctor in Smyrna, who shook him furiously. What was he doing? Didn’t he know how many people were out looking for him?

This time, Sherif returned to his family unscathed, his head full of the magic fairytale city, but he wouldn’t always be so lucky.