Irish Examiner
December 27, 2012 Thursday
Why we should get in touch with our inner Hadji Bey for the future
By Victoria White
Thursday, December 27, 2012
JUST a small, round yellow box in a Christmas hamper, but what a flood
of memories! Straight away I was back in our old sitting-room some
Christmas in the distant past. My father had got the same small, round
yellow box as a present and he was holding it aloft saying, “Hadji
Bey!”
As a child we can take the temperature of our parents very well. I
knew this wasn’t just politeness. He was stirred. I didn’t even like
that powdery Turkish Delight, but I understood that Hadji Bey was a
name with a special meaning for my father.
And I put the moment away the way children do, to be studied at some
time in the future.
And so this was the moment. With my Christmas box of Turkish Delight
in my hand, and the Internet at my disposal – a word my father had
never heard when he died in 1980 – I decided to find out. And I opened
up new ways of understanding my father and my history.
As soon as I saw a picture of Hadji Bey’s wedding cake of a shop on
MacCurtain Street I knew my father must have loved it when he was
growing up in Cork. I am sure his parents brought him there. My
grandfather was an accountant on the South Mall, so he was exactly the
type of client Haratun Batmazian was seeking to attract.
My grandmother had a lot of notions about herself so she too would
have been a classic Hadji Bey customer. She used to leave her
Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve so that she could feel the buzz
of the city. I picture her between the gleaming glass presses of Hadji
Bey’s, mesmerised by rich pinks and yellows.
As I now know from Hadji Bey: Milseain na Tuirce I gCorcaigh, which I
missed on TG4 last year, Haratun Batmazian, who founded Hadji Bey,
came to Cork for the Great Exhibition in 1902 and stayed. He was proud
to be a subject of the British Empire. Which was another reason for my
grandparents to frequent the shop. My grandfather was an Englishman
who came to Cork from Birmingham in 1914 and was followed by my
grandmother.
The casually intertwined lives of Haratun Batmazian and my grandfather
show us a Cork throbbing with opportunity as part of the British
Empire. Which led to a sudden realisation: Irish independence was
terrible for Cork. From then on Dublin, which had been no more than an
administrative centre, sucked the energy out of the rest of the
country.
As time goes on, I’m more and more attracted to our British past, not
because I want to go back there, but because it was a time when we
were part of a big, multi-national union. I grew up loving the
teddy-bear shape of Ireland on my green passport. Now I see the
nation-state as a passing, 19th century fashion. I want an Ireland
which is open and connected, and I recognise that there is no such
thing as full sovereignty for a country as small as ours.
Haratun Batmazian was an Armenian Christian who came to Cork to escape
the racial pogroms which the Ottoman Empire was carrying out. The
flexing of the muscles of different empires led inevitably to the
First World War. The collapse of empires led to the heyday of the
nation state.
But interestingly, Batmazian, escaping the Ottomans, clung ardently to
another empire, the British one. When his shop was burned down,
probably by veterans from the Munsters’ disastrous campaign against
Turkey in Gallipoli, he published a moving public letter under the
heading, “Live and Let Live!” in which he explained that he had come
to Britain because he had heard that there he would find “freedom”.
I wonder how he felt about Irish independence? I wonder how my
grandparents felt about it? My father said they were staunch
Unionists. I imagine they just pretended it wasn’t happening. My
grandmother still considered herself a blow-in when she died after
more than 60 years in Cork. “I don’t know what folks do here”, she
would say, and once I heard my Cork-born aunt respond, “Granny, you’ve
lived here longer than I have.”
But despite the unionism there is the intriguing fact that my
grandfather left England and settled in Ireland as a young man in
1914. Was he escaping the draft? Or was it just, as my uncle said,
that he had a working-class background and couldn’t rise in the
accountancy profession in England? Who knows. But these two adoptive
Corkmen tell a story about the cosmopolitanism of the city at that
time. Cork had the advantage of one of the best natural harbours in
the world. But it was also important that the city was part of a
political and trading union which covered half the globe.
And I think my father went into Haratun Batmazian’s shop as a young
boy and decided he was going to Constantinople. It took him years. He
was the first in his family to go to university, winning a scholarship
in Greek to study Persian and Arabic. He was aiming to go to the BBC
but he ended up in The Irish Times and RTE and finally, as deputy
president of the European Broadcasting Union, got to Constantinople,
now Istanbul.
I grew up fasinated by the orthodox icons and I still am. My first
holiday from college I got a train from Dublin to Istanbul along the
famous Orient Express route and went to see the famous Byzantine
cathederal of Agia Sofia.
THE origin of all this obsession may well be a shop in Cork fragrant
with rose, almond, lime, tangerine and bergamot. Little round yellow
and pink boxes. How they must have turned the head of a romantic young
boy.
But even as my father grew up, his city was shutting down to the
world. Hadji Bey was sold in 1971. But it has been revived by L.C.
Confectionery in Kildare who are already focussing on exporting the
sweets. It shouldn’t be hard. The Batmazians used to sell to Harrods.
We should never forget how much opportunity there is in international
co-operation. No-one would want to go back to imperial structures, but
I have to admit that I would have no problem with a stronger, more
cohesive Europe.
The euro was badly designed but its collapse would kill the EU. And we
have teetered on the brink. I was interested to hear Minister Leo
Varadkar say earlier this year that he had been reading about the
collapse of currency unions, particularly the crisis which followed
the end of the Austro-Hungarian union in 1931. I hope he encouraged
his fellow Cabinet members to study their history.
We assume the presidency of the EU in four days’ time and I hope we
can help lead the Union further away from the brink. I want my
children to grow up in an Ireland which is part of a bigger, broader
world, as it was when my grandfather and Haratun Batmazian came to
Cork.
Over the next six months, I hope we will all get in touch with our
inner Hadji Bey.
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