TURKEY THROUGH A TRAVELER’S EYES: FROM ISTANBUL TO DIYARBAKIR WITH E. B. SOANE IN 1908 (2)
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Jan 13 2014
13 January 2014 /TERRY RICHARDSON, ÝSTANBUL
Today Þanlýurfa is one of the high points of any visit to Turkey’s
Southeast. This fast-growing city, its economy buoyed by the vast
irrigation project that is GAP (the Southeast Anatolian Project),
has an ancient heart spruced-up over the past couple of decades to
meet the demands of visitors.
GALLERY
They come here to experience Turkey’s most authentically Middle
Eastern bazaar, wander round the restored houses of the old quarter,
clamber to the top of a fantastic citadel rock overlooking the lush
gardens at its feet, and spend a night or two in a classy boutique
hotel fashioned from a period, honey-hued stone mansion.
The cave reputed to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham is a
major draw for pilgrims from all over the Islamic world, while the
beautiful gardens at the foot of the citadel, incongruously green and
manicured in this dry and torrid region, appeal to Muslim pilgrims
and tourists alike. Here too are the still waters of the Pools of
Abraham, filled with shoals of overfed carp whose ancestors were
created when God rescued Abraham, hurled onto a pyre by the tyrant
Nimrod (Nemrut), by miraculously transforming the flames into water,
the burning branches into fish.
Urfa’s corner loafer efendis
The Urfa discovered by Soane a little over a hundred years ago was
rather different. Walls “of peculiar blackness,” likely going back
to the time of the city’s re-foundation as Edessa (the old name for
the city) in the Hellenistic period, still “stand everywhere.” Today
there are only scant remains. Gone too are the “families of sedentary
Kurds” who inhabited the “innumerable cave-dwellings of the ancients”
in the rocky outcrops around the citadel, as have the “enormous number
of Armenians” whom Sloane reports as living in the “clustered houses
upon the hummock forming the Armenian quarter.”
Like many a visitor today, Soane was captivated by Urfa, writing,
“The water supply is plentiful, the scenery around beautiful in its
ruggedness and the fantastic nature of its hills.” In fact, for the
anti-Turkish, London-born adventurer, Urfa’s only major problem was
the “Turks and their misrule,” not least the gaggles of minor Ottoman
officials, or “corner loafer efendis in uniform,” as Soane called
them, who “never appeared to have any kind of duties” bar cluttering
up Urfa’s cafes and eyeing travelers with suspicion.
Soaked in Siverek
After just two days in Urfa, where he stayed in a caravanserai, Soane
headed northeast for Diyarbakýr. The landscape around the mid-point of
his journey, the town of Siverek, is a bleak one, a vast lava-encrusted
plateau blasted by wind, rain and snow in winter, baked under a fierce
sun in summer. Soane describes “[t]he prospect as always immense,
always dreary” as he plodded across the plateau in April, with snow
patches still clinging to the rocks and the “sullen, frowning masses
of the Kurdistan mountains” to the north “half hidden in black clouds.”
Soane passed the night in Siverek in a “ruinous” Armenian-run
caravanserai. The sole high-point of his visit to the “mean town”
and its “peculiarly surly and ill-mannered” inhabitants was the
friendliness of the local imam. Having established Soane’s credentials
as a genuine Muslim by having him “repeat the creed,” he then helped
him buy bread from “an earth-oven” for the bargain price of “ten flaps
for two-pence.” Having been rained on all night in his leaky cell in
the caravanserai, Soane and his Muslim companions were outraged at the
price they were charged for their sub-standard accommodation and left
“cursing Christians and pagans in general and Armenians in particular.”
Few tourists venture to Siverek even today, though a handful do pass
through en route to Diyarbakýr from Urfa or Kahta (the base for Mt.
Nemrut), unsurprisingly given its bleak location and lack of obvious
historical remains. It’s nowhere near so unlovely as the town described
by Soane in 1908, however. Even his goal, though, was less than
spectacular at first sight than he might have hoped. “Approaching from
the west, Diarbekr is not beautiful nor remarkable …(it) appears as
a citadel of black stone without any green or vegetation.” He bucked
up as he got nearer, though, as “on slopes and the lands by the river
banks, there are splendid gardens, which in this month of April were
dressed in all the delicate hues of blossom and new leaf.”
Into the black city
Panic mode set in as Soane crossed the Tigris (Dicle) and neared a city
ringed by 6 kilometers of some of the finest Medieval city walls in
the world, as he knew the travel documents he had obtained in Ýstanbul
would be inspected at the gateway. And here he was, in the guise of
a Kurdish Muslim haci returning to his home in Persia from Mecca —
and known as such by his Muslim road companions — travelling on a
document “proclaiming [him] an English, British-born… Christian.”
At least he looked the part. “I was darkened by the wind and sun;
nine days black beard scraped the chest left bare by a buttonless
shirt. My trousers were muddy and torn, and I wore a long overcoat
very much like the robes of any of the myriad Turkish subjects who
adopt semi-European dress.”
Fortunately, the official was “utterly illiterate,” holding his
“passport… upside down” when inspecting it, and was satisfied
with Soane’s verbal assurances that he was a Persian-born British
subject en route to Mosul. “[W]ith a polite good-day,” Soane and his
companions passed through the formidable black basalt walls into what
was, and remains today, one of Turkey’s most fascinating cities.
Fortunately, the walled city of Diyarbakir has changed but little in
terms of its physical appearance since the time of Soane’s visit, its
venerable black with contrasting white stone-built houses, mosques,
churches, hans, caravanserais and the like still lining cobbled
streets following its original late-Roman ground plan. Indeed, the city
retains a fine caravanserai, the Deliler Haný, now a boutique hotel.
Coffee shops, Christians and conversations in Kurdish
>From his description, however, it seems that Soane lodged at the Hasan
Paþa Han. Today this beautifully restored building near Daðý Kapýsý
(Mountain Gate), built around an airy courtyard, is home to boutique
shops selling old carpets, kilims and brassware, as well as to a
coterie of cafes specializing in delicious Kurdish breakfast spreads.
Soane was delighted that his upstairs room had “a board floor, another
luxury this, in a country whose floors are of mud.” Like many travelers
to Turkey even now, once he had secured his lodgings for the night
Soane “retired to a coffee house outside for a cup of tea.”
But unlike most contemporary foreigner visitors, Soane was able to
converse with the cafe’s customers in the Kurdish he had learned
while working in Persia. One drawback, though, was that in his guise
as a Muslim, he was unable to visit the churches of the Christian
Armenians, Chaldeans (Keldani), Nestorians, Greeks and Syrian Orthodox
(Suriyani) who, along with the Kurds, then made up the majority of
the populous. Mind you, his view of the “Eastern” Christians was every
bit as negative as his opinion of the Turks. “It is unfortunate that
the Asiatic Christian is, as a rule, a very undesirable creature,
more bigoted than the most fanatical Muhammadan, of a craft and an
infidelity seldom witnessed in other lands, and of an attitude to
his co-religionists of different tenets that can only be described
as traitorous.”
By raft down the Tigris
Soane’s eventual goals were first Mosul, then Suleymaniya, in what
is now Northern Iraq but was then still Ottoman territory. Today,
in spite of the political turmoil in Iraq, it’s easy enough to hop
on a comfy air-conditioned coach in Diyarbakýr and head for various
cities in the relatively stable Kurdish enclave. The intrepid Sloane,
by contrast, used the best method available to the traveler in 1908,
a raft down the Tigris.
The vessel on which he floated down one of the world’s most evocative
rivers was a kalak, formed “from two hundred inflated goat skins
arranged in the form of ten by twenty … bound to a few thin
transverse poplar trunks above them.” Soane shared this ingenious
craft with an elderly Kurdish Haci he’d befriended in the caravanserai,
an Arab merchant from Mosul, a “foul-mouthed, blasphemous” young man
recently discharged from the Ottoman military and, last but not least,
sack loads of dried apricots.
All went well at first, as the raft drifted gently down a placid
river under clear blue skies. The third day brought a “strong gale
… with torrential rain,” soaking clothing, bedding and food alike,
even the sacks of apricots the passengers tried to seek shelter behind
were “slippery with the juice and wet that oozed from them.” The next
dawned fair, but with the river running high after the storm the raft
“was flying along at express speed” through deep defiles and “running
over submerged rocks.”
To Hasankeyf and Cizre
Further downstream, as the current slowed, Soane was treated to “one
of the most remarkable sights the Tigris has to offer.” They had
reached the soon-to-be-submerged ancient city of Hasankeyf, perched
on a sheer bluff above the river. Soane noted of Hasankeyf that “most
remarkable of all were the great piers of a once colossal bridge,” but
also mentions “cave dwellings,” minarets “the dimensions of factory
chimneys,” “a staircase zig-zagging down the cliff-face to where the
river laps the rocks wall.” All this survives for the time being,
but the waters of the Ilisu dam will soon destroy one of Turkey’s
most remarkable and beautiful sights.
Surviving a number of shots fired by Kurdish bandits, Soane and his
companions eventually reached Cizre, the last stop of his journey
on what is today Turkish territory. Here he was treated to tea by
curious locals before purchasing dates and rope for the remainder of
his river journey to Mosul.
Postcript: Soane made it to Mosul, then traveled onto Turkmen-dominated
Kirkuk. From there he crossed dangerous bandit country by caravan to
Suleymaniya. There he spent a considerable, making various forays to
places such as Halabja, before finally ending up in Baghdad. Here,
although he dispensed with his disguise, he was unable to adapt to his
old life. The sight of the “European bread, milky tea and boiled eggs”
served up in his hotel disgusted him and he “called for tea from a
tea shop, milkless, and in a small glass, not a great footbath of a
cup.” Sitting in a chair, not cross-legged, was torture and, worse,
he “felt a stranger and lonelier than (he) had ever done before.” At
journey’s end, Soane pined for “the coffee house and the bazaar, of
the multitudes of which I was one, and equal, and spoke and laughed,
and fought and wrangled.”
For a brief biography of Soane, and to read more about his adventures,
see Part 1 of this Today’s Zaman feature.
http://www.todayszaman.com/news-336460-turkey-through-a-travelers-eyes-from-istanbul-to-diyarbakir-with-e-b-soane-in-1908-2.html