The Towers of Trebizond Read online

  "Ah. You think they spy for us, your friends. In that case, we must wish them luck. But there is nothing we can do to help them. Perhaps your ambassador can make enquiry. But if they spy, they are outside help, they must help themselves. I am sorry."

  They don't spy, I thought, at least I don't think they spy, except on the fish in the lakes and rivers. But our ambassador will make enquiry; Halide will see to that. Perhaps we should report to the newspapers; perhaps the press attaché will see to that. For my part I shall wait in Trebizond, because that is where they will come back to.

  I left the Consulate. I regretted the consul and his wife; this vice consul was no use. I dined alone in the Yessilyurt restaurant, and a kind young Turk whom we had met before came and talked to me. I could see that he did not think we should see aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg again, for Turks take this view of those who vanish into Russia. But he said he would come down with me to the quay to-morrow and get some fishermen to let me go out in their boat with them and try for kalkan baligi. But I would rather try for khamsi baligi, which is still more liked, and I had read that great quarrels had always occurred in the market place when this popular fish arrived. Hadrian, who always did so much good to towns, and particularly to Trebizond, had a brass model of it put on a column outside the city gate, and this brass fish was a talisman that attracted the similar fish in the sea to throw themselves on the shore, thus saving the fishermen trouble, and this went on till the birth of that spoil-sport Prophet, which immediately, it seems, checked talismans and magic, so unlike Christianity the religion he started was; though what was he doing stopping magic in Trebizond, a Christian Byzantine city? Actually from all accounts a very great deal of magic flourished all through the Middle Ages in Trebizond, which was a great city for enchanters and magicians. But these khamsi baligi did cease to come up on the shore for themselves, though the sea still abounded with them during the fifty days of the season of southerly winds, and I suppose it still does. Evliya Efendi, writing in the seventeenth century, says that when the boats full of them arrive in harbour, the fish-dealers sound a horn and people stop whatever they are doing, even praying, and run after the fish like madmen. And one cannot be surprised, for it is a shining white fish which does not smell fishy, does not set up a fever, cures sore mouths, and is an aphrodisiac of extraordinary potency, and this is a thing Turks value. It is used in cooking many dishes, to which it gives a peculiar flavour, and it is a dish of friendship and love. So I hoped that I should catch some, as it was now the season for them.

  After dinner I went and saw the camel, and gave it a dose of its sedative, then I sat in the gardens and read the letters I had collected from the Post Office, which were from Vere, who was one of a party sailing about the Aegean in the yacht of a press lord, and they might be touching next at Smyrna. Reading Vere's letters, and writing a reply to them, filled me with adultery again, our love being so great, and Vere so amusing and so much my companion, and I wanted very much to be on the press lord's yacht, though yachts always make me seasick. I wrote to Vere till long after dark, telling about everything, while at the other tables men played trictrac, and the radio in the trees among the electric lights crooned away like cats on the tiles, and the lights twinkled out from the fishing boats in the bay.

  Then I went up to the Yessilyurt smoking-room, which was one of the rooms that opened out from the round central hall on the first floor, and Turkish men of trade sat about drinking water or raki or coffee and reading commercial papers and smoking. The hotel resounded with the shouts of men of commerce trying to telephone to Samsun, which was a thing I remembered that they tried to do most of the day and night, and whenever one of our party had tried to telephone to the Consulate or to Istanbul, we had been stopped by a call from Samsun coming through for someone. I wondered how they had done business between Trebizond and Samsun in the nineteenth century, when the Yessilyurt was the Hotel d'Italie and then the Hotel des Voyageurs, and nothing was changed in it except that now there was a telephone which did not work very well, and a chain to pull which did not always work very well either. But it was a nice hotel, and I liked the management and the porter and the restaurant and the old lady who did the rooms, and I felt at home here. I do not know when it was built.

  I studied my Turkish phrase book, and learned a few of the most useful ones by heart. One was about how I did not understand Turkish well, which I copied into my note-book and carried about with me; I also copied Is there anyone here who speaks English, can you tell me the way if you please, thank you, what does this cost it is too much money, and some enquiries about meals. I crossed out some phrases I had copied before, such as when does the bus, train and other conveyance start, because henceforth I should always be starting on the camel. I had already mastered, "Where can I put my camel?" When I had done some Turkish, I read Charles's manuscript about Trebizond, which was very good and detailed, and I decided to take it with me as I went about the town looking at things, as it would help me to identify them and was very intellectual and full of information. Charles also quoted things from the books of old travellers such as Bessarion in the 15th century, and Evliya Efendi in the 17th, and various 19th century tourists, so that one got many views of Trebizond, how it had looked at different times, and he had put in bits from H. F. B. Lynch, and descriptions of church paintings from Professor David Talbot Rice, and a lot more, besides what he had invented himself, so that altogether it was a very interesting manuscript. I supposed that what I had was probably a rough draft, and that there was another copy, which would get published somewhere, and I thought I would keep this one so long as I stayed in Trebizond, as it was such a good write-up of the town and neighbourhood. He quoted from Evliya Efendi about the delicious wines and fruits, fine-flavoured grapes, cherries red as woman's lips, apples called Sinope, figs called something else, which are the sweetest in the world, purple oranges, pomegranates and olives, and as for flowers, there is a ruby-coloured pink peculiar to this place, each blossom like a red rose and perfumes the brain with the sweetest scent. I would look out for this pink, as well as for all that fruit, and the delicate fishes that abounded.

  Another feature of Trebizond life which interested me seemed to be Charles's own discovery. It had been generally noticed in the Middle Ages that this famous but remote Byzantine city had been much addicted to magic and full of notorious wizards, enchanters and alchemists, who practised their arts for the benefit of those who paid for their services. It had, of course, been a Byzantine art and industry; the arrival of the down-to-earth, matter-of-fact Ottomans, who were neither clever or imaginative, and thought wizardry wrong, had driven it underground, to be practised privately and lucratively by the Greeks who remained in the city after the Turkish massacres. Like the fairies, the enchanters were of the old profession. The expulsion of the remaining Greeks by Atatürk had, you might suppose, dealt the obsolescent craft its coup-de-grâce; but this was not, it seemed, the case, it still survived in corners, among pseudo-Turkish Greeks who turned an honest lira by selling fair winds to fishing-boats and charming the desired fishes into the nets, making up love potions (which no doubt they merely labelled "The Mixture"), making marriages fruitful, restoring youthful beauty to women and youthful potency to men, bestowing on unborn infants the gift of maleness (money refunded if the charm failed to work, unless the enchanter could prove that the mother had not obeyed instructions faithfully), blessing business enterprises so that they resulted in wealth, and inflicting all kinds of malicious damages on enemies by means of wax images and so on.

  Charles and David had been introduced to some of these enchanters, who plied their craft unostentatiously in back streets or in walled gardens up in the citadel, concealed from the eyes of scornful and disapproving Moslems. Here they wove their spells, made brews and stews out of herbs and fruits and fishes which should bring love or death, fortune or grief, success or disaster, to their consumers, and in quiet corners of the beach they sold winds and blessed the nets and cast s
pells on the fish in the sea. Charles had noted some of their names and addresses on his manuscript, though I supposed not for publication, and I thought I would seek them out and buy myself some luck, and a nice potion for the camel. Altogether, it did not appear that in Trebizond, so long as you did not call it Trabzon, you could have a dull moment.

  I went to bed, and fell asleep to the shouts of those who had got through to Samsun but could not attract the attention of their correspondents there, and this seemed not surprising, as it was so late at night that the Samsun men of affairs would have left their offices, in which they did not seem anyhow to spend much time.

  Chapter 14

  Next morning while I was having breakfast, the Imam came into the restaurant, the one who had followed us about on Corpus Christi when we had the procession and service in the square, and had started a counter-offensive. It seems that he had heard of my return, and came round to warn me. So he warned me through my Turkish friend who sometimes explained to the management what I was trying to say, and who was called Odobasiogli and he had an office on the quay. He told me that the Imam was saying that I must hold no services in Trabzon, or he would call the police. I said I would hold no services, since I was not, as he could see, a priest. Then he said I was not to make speeches to the people, and I promised I would not. He looked at me suspiciously, remembering aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg, and asked where they were, and I said to Odobasiogli that I wished I knew. The Imam looked as if he knew quite well that they were up to no good somewhere, but so long as it was not in Trabzon, he could do nothing about it, so he went away after he had drunk two cups of coffee, which relieved me, as I was a good deal frightened of this Imam, a very dignified and formidable clergyman.

  After breakfast I went out and rode the camel up the hill and across the ravine to the palace and citadel, and I had a good plan of the citadel which Charles had copied from Lynch. The porter said things to me in Turkish as I went out, but I said my phrase about not understanding Turkish.

  Many Turks can't understand that any one really does not know Turkish; they think that if they say it often enough and loud enough it will register. They did this whenever I said this phrase; it seemed to start them off asking what seemed to be questions, but I only said my piece again, and after a time they gave it up. Sometimes they said "Yorum, yorum, yorum?" as if they were asking something, but I did not know what this word meant, and I thought they were mimicking what they thought I had said. This was all that happened about it for a few days, then one day when I said my piece to the porter he nodded, and went to the telephone and rang someone up, and presently a man came downstairs and bowed to me as I stood in the hall and said something to me in Turkish. I had better explain here that there was a misunderstanding which was my fault, for I discovered some time afterwards that I had copied the phrase in the book which was just below the one which meant "I do not understand Turkish," and the one I had copied and learnt and had been saying to every one for days meant "Please to phone at once to Mr. Yorum," though this seems a silly phrase to print in a book for the use of people who do not know Mr. Yorum at all and never would want to telephone to him. But one day this Mr. Yorum turned up at the Yessilyurt to stay, and the porter saw then what I wanted him to do, and he rang Mr. Yorum in his room and asked him to come down. But I did not know then about my mistake, and when Mr. Yorum spoke to me I said again that I did not understand Turkish, and he bowed and pointed to himself. I thought he must be offering to interpret for me, but when I tried English on him he shook his head and said, "Yok, yok," and I could see he knew none. So I looked up the Turkish for "What can I have the pleasure of doing for you?" and said it, but of course I did not understand his answer, and that is the worst of foreign languages, you understand what you say in them yourself, because you have looked it up before saying it, but very seldom what the foreigners say to you, because you have not looked up that at all. So I looked through the book till I found "Who are you, sir?" and he said in reply, "Yorum, Yorum, Yorum." I saw there was some confusion somewhere, but there is always so much confusion in Turkey that I let it go, and ordered drinks for both of us, and we drank them, then he went away, quite pleased that I had telephoned to him to come and have a drink. The hotel people began to be more pleased with me too, so I thought Mr. Yorum must be quite an important man. Several more times on other days I told them I didn't understand Turkish, and each time they rang Mr. Yorum and he came, and sometimes I paid for the drinks and sometimes he did. He and the hotel staff must have thought I had taken a great fancy to him, or else that I was working up to some deal I wanted to do with him. The fourth time he came I had a bright idea that I would give him one of the Mowbray manuals that aunt Dot had left behind her in a haversack, because I thought she would wish me to continue her Anglican work on the natives, and also each manual which I got rid of would lighten the haversack, which bumped against the camel's side when it ran. So I went and got this manual, which was called "Why I belong to the Church of England", and was slightly translated into Turkish by Halide, and I gave it to Mr. Yorum, who thanked me and looked at it with surprise, and it must have dawned on him that I was a missionary and was trying to convert him and that this was why I kept sending for him.

  After that he must have told the hotel staff not to ring him for me again, for when I said please to telephone him at once they shrugged and threw out their hands and looked at me despisingly. Soon after this I looked at my phrase book and saw what I had been saying all this time. It seemed an extraordinary thing to say, let alone to be necessary in phrase books, but no one had seemed surprised, and the fact is that no one is much surprised at anything in Turkey. I wasn't myself. They didn't even seem much surprised by the Anglican Church, as most people abroad are, though when I saw it beside Islam and the Greek Church, I didn't myself think it looked nearly so odd, or was, in fact, as Churches go, really odd at all. I mean, with religion you get on a different plane, and everything is most odd. It only goes to show that human beings are odd, because they have always been, on the whole, so religious.

  My days settled down into a kind of rhythm. In the mornings I would often go fishing, either in a boat with fishermen casting nets, while I fished with a rod and line, or I would ride the camel down the shore to the Pyxids or some other river, and fish there for whatever there was. Sometimes there were some nice salmon. In the sea I got several kalkans, and sometimes a khamsi, for it was the khamsi season. I would give them to the hotel cook to cook them in any way he liked for my supper. After I had fished in the morning I would lunch on sandwiches and raki, and spend the afternoon exploring, and sketching, often up in the citadel. There was much less left of this and of the Byzantine palace than there had been at the end of the last century, when Lynch was there and drew the plan that Charles had copied. The outer walls then seem to have been almost complete, and set with massive towers; houses were built inside and against them, but now they were jumbled ruins whose stones had been used to build a labyrinth of cottages and small houses in a wilderness of gardens, so that the plan was lost and overgrown in roofs and trees and shrubs. But one could make out, with the plan, how it had been, and where the different fortresses and gates had stood, and there was the palace banqueting hall, roofless now, and grown with long grass and fig trees, and eight pointed windows with slim dividing columns. It was in the banqueting hall that I spent most time, painting, and looking out through the Byzantine windows at the mountains behind, and down the steep ravine to the sea in front, and imagining the painted walls and the marble floors and the gold-starred roof, and the Comnenus emperors sitting on their golden thrones, and the Byzantine courtiers and clergymen talking to one another, intriguing, arranging murders, discussing the Trinity, in which they took such immense interest, talking of the barbarians who were threatening the Empire and later, after Constantinople had fallen, and Trebizond was the Empire, debating how to hold it, how much tribute could be paid to the Turks, how best to form an anti-Turkish union, whose eyes should b
e put out, what envoys should be sent to Rome. All the centuries of lively Byzantine chatter, they had left whispering echoes in that place where the hot sun beat down on the fig trees and the small wind and small animals stirred in the long grass. The Byzantines had been active in mind and tongue, not lethargic like the Turks; they had had no dull moments, they had babbled and built and painted and quarrelled and murdered and tortured and prayed and formed heresies and doctrines and creeds and sacramentaries, they had argued and disputed and made factions and rebellions and palace revolutions, and to and fro their feet seemed to pass among the grasses that had been marble floors, and the last Greek empire brooded like a ghost in that forlorn fag end of time to which I too had come, lost and looking for I did not know what, while my camel munched the leaves of the carob tree outside the ruined wall.

  Churches had once stood all about this place; St. Eugenios, on a hill below the palace, and the Cathedral of the Gold-headed Virgin, now both mosques, could be seen from the windows; once, it was said, there had been a thousand churches in Trebizond. Most were destroyed, many were now mosques, many used for dwellings or store-houses. Charles had a list of a lot of them, and what state they were now in, and I could see that he had got it from Lynch and from David Talbot Rice and Patrick Kinross, and I thought he ought to have acknowledged these books, but perhaps he had meant to when his own book should be printed, or perhaps he had hoped that people would think he had found it all out for himself from observations and from older writers, who reflect more credit than new ones do, but now that poor Charles was in purgatory, no doubt he was learning to be more truthful. Anyhow, his manuscript was very helpful to me as I went about Trebizond.

  Sometimes when I was sketching the citadel and palace, someone or other would come out from one of the cottages or gardens and speak to me. He would point to the ruins and say "Turkceji," looking proud and pleased. But I would shake my head and say, "Yok. Ellenceji," but I did not know exactly what was the Turkish for Greek, because my phrase book had left it out, like Armenia, though it had put in nearly all the other countries, even Rusya. I suppose this was on account of Kemal Atatürk having turned out the Greeks from Turkey, so that they did not need to be spoken about any more, and the Greek buildings that were everywhere about, both ancient Greek and Byzantine Greek, and the Roman ones too, which were all so useful to the Turks for taking stones from for new buildings, had always seemed to them to be Turkish, because they were in Turkey. When the Turks went on repeating that the Comnenus palace and the citadel were Turkceji, I got annoyed, and as they would not accept "Ellenceji," I said "Inglizce," because I thought we had as much claim to have built the palace and citadel as Turks had. They looked at me suspiciously when I said this, as if they thought I was saying that the English were planning to capture and occupy Trabzon, and I wished we could do this, except that we spoil anywhere we occupy, like Cyprus and Gibraltar, with barracks and dull villas and pre-fabs. Actually, if we took Trebizond, we should probably clear away the Turkish houses and gardens and alleys from the citadel and cut away the trees and shrubs and leave it all stark and bare like a historical monument, and we should build a large harbour and fill it with cargo ships, and a few battle-ships, and there would be a golf club and a yacht club and a bathing beach and several smart hotels and a casino and a cinema and a dance hall and a new brothel, and several policemen, and a hospital, and a colony of villas, and soldiers and sailors would crowd about the streets and call it Trab, and large steamers would ply every day to and from Istanbul bringing tourists, and the place would prosper once more, not as it used to in its great days when the trade from Persia and Arabia flowed into it by sea and caravan, and gold and jewels glittered like the sun and moon and stars within the palace, for no place any more can prosper like that, but it would be prosperous, it would have trade, it would have communications, inventions, luxury, it would have great warehouses on the quays and a great coming and going. The Greek enchanters would dive further underground, Christian churches would spring up, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Dissenting, where the British colony would pray, and there would be a Y.M.C.A. and a Y.W.C.A., where billiards and boxing would be played, and English women would drive about the streets and sit and drink coffee and tea in the gardens, and Turkish women would become like the women of Istanbul and Ankara and Izmir, walking the streets with naked faces unashamed. And that would be the end of the Trebizond of legend and romance, and of the Byzantine empire fallen under the heavy feet of Turks but still a lovely, haunting, corrupt and assassinating ghost, whispering of intrigue and palace revolutions and heresies in the brambled banqueting hall among the prowling cats beneath the eight Byzantine windows.