2006 - The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  He had detected a flicker of interest—but it hadn’t developed.

  The soup master pulled at his moustaches again. The meeting disturbed him. The men weren’t exactly insolent, but they were cold. The soup master felt that he had run a risk for their sakes, giving them work when they were desperate; but there had been no answering gratitude on this occasion.

  He stopped short of dismissing them, with an uneasy feeling that a wordless threat had been issued. That he should mind his own business—as if the theft of a pot, and the subsequent denials, weren’t his business entirely! But he could not simply dismiss them now. If they suffered, he might suffer. He could be accused of aiding and abetting the enemies of the Porte.

  He crammed his massive hands together, kneading his fingers.

  Was there no way of paying them back for their disloyalty? He thought of the eunuch.

  The eunuch had some status in the palace.

  The soup master wondered how he could become better acquainted with that man.

  [ 83 ]

  Yashim spent the morning visiting the three sites he had identified from the old map the night before. He hoped that something would strike him if he searched with an open mind.

  A tekke did not have to be large, but a big space might provide a clue. A tekke did not, of itself, have to conform to any particular shape, yet a small dome might suggest a place of worship. So would, perhaps, a stoup for holy water, or a redundant niche, or a forgotten inscription over a doorway, in a corridor—little signs which might seem insignificant in themselves, but taken together would help to point him in the right direction.

  Failing that, he could always ask.

  The first street he visited was only gradually recovering from the effects of a fire which had burned so fiercely that the few stone buildings had finally exploded. Large, broken blocks still lay embedded in the ash that drifted listlessly up and down the charred-out street. Some men were poking in the ash with sticks; Yashim supposed they were householders, searching for their savings. They answered him slowly, as if their thoughts were still far away. None of them knew about a tekke.

  The second place turned out to be a small, irregularly shaped square jTist within the city walls. It was a working-class district, with a fair number of Armenians and Greeks among the Turkish shopkeepers whose little booths were gathered along its eastern edge. The buildings were in poor repair. It was almost impossible to guess their age. In a poor district buildings tended to be repaired and recycled beyond their normal life-expectancy. Come a fire, and people built afresh in the same style as their fathers and grandfathers.

  Across from the shops stood a small but sedate and clean mosque, and behind it a little whitewashed house where the imam lived. He came to the door himself, leaning on a stick, an old, very bent man with a straggling white beard and thick spectacles. He was rather deaf, and seemed confused and even irritated when Yashim asked him about the Karagozi.

  “We are all orthodox Muslims here,” he kept saying in a reedy voice. “Eh? I can’t understand you. Aren’t you a Muslim? Well, then. I don’t see what—We are all good Muslims here.”

  He banged his stick once or twice, and when Yashim got away he continued to stand there on his threshold, leaning on his stick and following him with his thick spectacles until he had rounded the corner.

  From the shopkeepers he learned that a market took place in the square every other day. But as for any Sufi tekke, abandoned or otherwise, they only shrugged. A group of old men, sitting out under a tall cypress growing close to the base of the old wall, discussed the matter between themselves, but their conversation soon moved on to memories of other places, and one of them began a long story about a Mevlevi dervish he’d once met in Ruse, where he had been born almost a century ago. Yashim slipped away while the men were still talking.

  By late morning he had reached the third, and last, of the possibilities suggested by Eugenia’s map, a tight knot of small alleys in the west of the city where it had been impossible to pinpoint, with any degree of accuracy, either the street or building the tekke had appeared to occupy.

  Yashim wandered around, defining a kind of circuit which he spent more than an hour exploring. But these narrow streets, as always, yielded little: it was impossible to guess what was going on behind the high blind facades, let alone imagine what might have taken place there fifteen or a hundred years before. It was only at the last minute, when Yashim was ready to give up, that he accosted a ferrety man with a waxed moustache who was stepping out of a porte cochere, carrying a string bag.

  The man jumped when Yashim spoke.

  “Who do you want?” he snapped.

  “It’s a tekke,” Yashim began—and as he said it he was struck by an idea. “I’m looking for a Sufi tekke, I’m not sure whose.”

  The man looked him up and down.

  “Doesn’t it make a difference?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “They aren’t all the same, you know.”

  “Of course, I understand,” Yashim said peaceably. “In this case, I’m looking for a particular old tekke…I’m an architect,” he added wildly.

  He had spent the morning asking people if they remembered a Karagozi tekke. He had supposed that a redundant tekke could become anything from a shop to a tea-room. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that the most likely fate for an abandoned tekke was to be adopted by another sect. A Karagozi tekke would become someone else’s.

  “An old tekke.” The man swung his nose left and right. “There’s a Nasrani tekke in the next street. They’ve only been there ten years or so, but the building’s very old, if that’s what you mean.”

  The Karagozi were banned ten years ago.

  “That,” said Yashim, smiling, “is exactly what I mean.”

  The man offered to show him to the place. As they walked along, he said: “What do you make of all these murders, then?”

  It was Yashim’s turn to jump. A street dog got up from a doorway and barked at them.

  “Murders?”

  “The cadets, you must have heard. Everyone’s talking about them.”

  “Oh, yes. What do you think?”

  “I only think…what everyone says. It’s something big, isn’t it? Something about to happen.” He put his hand into the air as if feeling it with his pursed fingers. “I keep rats.”

  “Rats.”

  “Do you like animals? I used to keep birds. I loved it when the light fell on their cages in the winter. I kept them hanging, outside the window. The birds would always sing in the sunlight. In the end I let them go. But rats, they’re clever, and they don’t mind a cage. Plus I let them out, to run. You can see them stop and think about things.

  “I’ve got three. They’ve been acting strangely these last few days. Don’t want to come out of their cages. I take them out, of course, but they only want to hide somewhere. If it was just one, I could understand. I get times when I don’t want to see people, too, just want to stay at home and play with my pets. But all three, just the same. I think they feel it, too.”

  Yashim, who had never liked rats, asked: “What is it? What do they feel?”

  The man shook his head.

  “I don’t know what. People muttering, all closed up. Like I said, something’s happening and we don’t know what. Here you are, the tekke.”

  Yashim looked round in surprise. He had passed the low, win-dowless box earlier. It looked like a warehouse or a store-room.

  “Are you sure?”

  The man nodded briskly. “There might be no one there, but they seem to be around in the evenings. Good luck.” He waved the string bag. “Got to pick up some food for the rats,” he explained.

  Yashim gave him a weak smile.

  Then he knocked hard on the double doors.

  [ 84 ]

  Yes, Karagozi.” The man continued to smile gently.

  So this is it, Yashim thought. At the same time he looked about him with sudden curiosity. Was it here, then, that the Janissaries had indulged in
their bacchanalian rites? Bibbing, and women, and mystic poetry! Or something more prosaic, like a chamber of commerce, where business deals were fixed up and the soldiers who had become traders and artisans talked about the state of the market, and what they could squeeze from it.

  There was nothing superficially sacred about the place. As it stood, it could easily have been the warehouse that Yashim had originally mistaken it for, a plain, whitewashed chamber lit by high windows, with an oak table running down the middle and benches on either side. A banqueting hall, say. The walls were freshly whitened, but they seemed to have been painted once, to judge by the cloudy images he could still make out behind the lime.

  “The walls were decorated?”

  The tekkemaster inclined his head.

  “Very beautifully done.”

  “But—what, sacrilegious?”

  “To our minds, yes. The Karagozi were not afraid to make representations of what God has created. Perhaps they were able to do this with a pure heart. Yet those who believe as I do would have found them a distraction. I cannot say that this is why we had them painted over, though. It was more driven by a concern to return to the old purity of the tekke.”

  “I see. So wall painting was introduced into Karagozi tekkes more recently? It wasn’t the original idea?”

  The tekkemaster looked thoughtful.

  “I do not know. For us, the Karagozi occupation was an interlude we preferred not to commemorate.”

  Yashim looked up at the coffered ceiling.

  “Interlude? I don’t quite understand.”

  “Forgive me,” the tekkemaster said humbly. “I have not made myself clear, so perhaps you are unaware that this was a Nasrani tekke until the time of the Patrona Rebellion. The Karagozi grew very strong at that period, and they needed more space: so we gave it over to them. Recent events,” he added, with the usual cir—cumspection, “allowed us to reacquire the building, and the pictures were covered, as you see.”

  Yashim turned to him with a defeated look. The Patrona Rebellion had been in 1730.

  “You mean, this tekke was built by your order? It wasn’t originally a Karagozi foundation at all?”

  The man smiled and shook his head.

  “No. And so you see, we move in circles. What is open will be closed.”

  Five minutes later, Yashim was back in the street.

  Palewski’s map, drawn up by the Scotsman Ingiliz Mustafa, identified the old tekke correctly—for the time it was drawn up. The Karagozi hadn’t built it, though: it wasn’t one of the original four tekkes.

  But the principle had to be right.

  Yashim thought again of the little square under the old Byzantine walls of the city.

  He pictured it in his mind’s eye. The mosque. The row of shops. An old cypress against the weathered stonework of the walls.

  The tekke was there. It had to be there.

  [ 85 ]

  Half an hour later Yashim approached the square up a long, straight alley from the south.

  Straight ahead, beyond the mouth of the alley, he had a clear view of the splendid cypress where earlier he’d stood talking with the old men.

  From where he stood, five hundred yards back, he could see what he couldn’t see before. He could see over the top of the tree.

  Just behind its slender tip, in solitary semi-ruined splendour, a Byzantine tower rose from the massive city walls.

  The Kerkoporta. The little gate.

  Not many Stambouliots learned the story of the Conquest of 1453 in any detail. It was ancient history, almost four hundred years old. It had been the fulfilment of destiny, and the how, or why, of its successful capture from the defending Greeks was a matter of little interest or relevance to people living in Turkish Istanbul in the nineteenth century.

  Only two sorts of people had maintained their interest, and told the story to whoever wanted to listen.

  The Janissaries, with pride.

  The Phanariots, with regret—though whether that regret was perfectly genuine, Yashim had never quite been able to decide. For the Greek merchant princes of the Phanar, when all was said and done, had made their fortunes under Ottoman rule.

  Yashim could remember exactly where he’d been when he first heard, in detail, the story of the Turkish Conquest. The Mavrocordato mansion, in the upper Phanar district, was the grandest, gloomiest palace on its street. Locked away behind high walls, and built in a style of high rococo, it was the headquarters of a sprawling family operation which extended to the principalities of the Danube and the godowns of Trabzon, taking in titles civil and ecclesiastical on the way. The Mavrocordatos had produced over the centuries scholars and emperors, boyar overlords and admirals of the fleet, rogues, saints and beautiful daughters. They were fantastically rich, dazzlingly well connected, and dangerously well informed.

  There had been seven of them around a table, and Yashim. Their faces expressed many different things—humour and bitterness, dread or jealousy, complacency and contempt: but there had been one lovely face, too, he still saw sometimes in his dreams, whose glance said more. Only the eyes were the same, blue and brooding; Yashim had understood then why the Turks feared the blue eye.

  The table had been covered in an Anatolian carpet that must have taken years to make, so tightly was it knotted. Coffee had been served, and when the heavy curtains were closed and the servants had withdrawn George Mavrocordato, the heavy-jowled patriarch of the clan, had invited Yashim to make his report.

  Afterwards, George had slowly crossed to the fireplace, and the rest of them drifted over to sit with him in total silence that was like a form of speech. Eventually, George’s ancient mother had smoothed the belly of her black silk dress, and beckoned him across.

  And she had told him the story of the Conquest.

  [ 86 ]

  Now, stock-still in the alley, he remembered it all.

  Above all he remembered her bitterness when she told him about the Kerkoporta. The little gate.

  The siege had already lasted ninety days, when young Sultan Mehmed ordered a final assault on the walls. Exhausted and weak, the few thousand Byzantines who remained to defend their city heard the roll of the kettle drums, and saw the hills beyond the walls move as tens of thousands of Mehmed’s troops descended to the attack. Wave after wave broke on the thinly defended walls, raised a thousand years before: the Anatolian levies, the Bashi-Bazouks from the hills of Serbia and Bulgaria, renegades and adventurers from the whole Mediterranean world. With every assault that they repulsed, the defenders weakened, and still the attack came on, with Mehmed’s police standing at the rear with thongs and maces to discourage their retreat, the ladders crashing on the walls, the wild skirling of the Anatolian pipes, the fitful light of flares, and the sudden thundering crash of the Hungarian’s gigantic cannon.

  All the bells of the city were tolling. As the smoke cleared from the breach in the walls where the invading troops lay dying; as the defenders rushed to reconstitute the rubble; as the moon struggled clear of a ribbon of black and flying cloud, Mehmed himself advanced at the head of his crack infantry, the Janissaries. He led them to the moat, and from there they advanced, not in a wild battering frenzy like the irregulars and Turks who had been flung against the walls all through the night but, in the hour before dawn, in steady and unwavering file.

  “They fought on the walls, hand to hand, for an hour or more,” the old lady said. “Believing the Turks were failing. Even those Janissaries losing their momentum. It…it wasn’t so.”

  Yashim had watched her lips working against her toothless gums. Dry eyed, she said:

  “There was a little gate, you see, at the angle where the great old walls of Theodosius met the lesser walls behind the Palace of the Caesars. It had been blocked up, goodness knows how many years before. So little, that gate. I don’t think two men could pass through it abreast, but there—God’s will is infinite in its mystery. It was opened at the start of the siege, for sallies. A party had just returned from a sor
tie, and—would you believe it—the last man back forgot to bar the gate behind him.”

  It was the discovery of the little gate rocking on its hinges—a tiny gap in the whole eight miles of massive wall and inner wall, a momentary lapse of attention in a story that had run for a thousand years—that turned the course of the siege. Some fifty Janissaries shoved through and found themselves between the double walls. But their position was desperately exposed, and they might still have been driven back or killed by the defenders had one of the heroes of the defence, a Genoese sea-captain, not been seriously wounded by a close shot at that very moment. His crewmen bore him from the walls; the Byzantines sensed that he had abandoned them, and gave a shout of despair. The Ottomans made a rush for the inner walls and a giant called Hasan surged over the stockade at the head of his Janissary company.

  In ten minutes the Turkish flags were flying from the tower that stood above the Kerkoporta.

  All this was four hundred years ago.

  But now, rising behind the great cypress in the square, the tower of the Kerkoporta still stood, red and white and empty against the wintry blue sky.

  The exact spot where fifteen hundred years of Roman history reached its bloody climax, as the last emperor of Byzantium tore off his imperial insignia and, sword in hand, vanished into the melee, never to be seen again.

  The exact place where Constantinople, the Red Apple, the navel of the world, was won by the Janissaries for Islam and the sultan.

  Old Palmuk had been right after all.

  There was a fourth tower.

  The fourth tekke.

  Shaking his head at the memories he had summoned, Yashim walked forward into the winter sunlight.

  [ 87 ]

  The stone flight of steps which led up to the inner parapet of the first wall was invisible from the alley. To reach it, Yashim groped his way down an unmarked passage between two wooden houses built against the base of the wall. Reaching the top, he turned back and followed the parapet walk to the Kerkoporta Tower.