Joy Unconfined

by Ian Strathcarron

  The chances are that Byron never saw a Turkish woman, at least not one that wanted to be seen. Even now, a straw poll conducted along the quayside suggests only about one in twenty passers-by are people of the opposite - as it were - sex. In Byron’s day the society of the Ottoman Empire was a virulent patriarchy, and now like the Ottoman Empire before it the patriarchy is in a long and slow decline forced on it by external events. Judging by the look of the young women and girls all the old ways, in style at least, will be gone in two generations. It would sound patronising to lament its passing, which is where we came in.

  Talking of patronising, as we sail through the Sea of Marmara on the way to Constantinople let’s let Hobhouse write a diary entry of a street scene from Izmir: ‘ye streets are tolerably clean, and the dogs, plentiful, not given to misbehaving, overtly. Ye men are dressed in western shirts and trousers, save the beggars, who like ours are Roma and so dressed, men & women alike and oft with baby in arms. Of women we see some, and in generations some stroll in the shade in the evening. Ye grandmother will wear open sandals and patterned socks, the harem trousers - all colours not bright - but a lot of them. Floral prints. For her blouse another print, not matching, a large sleeveless cardigan - beige - and on her head a full and dark patterned hijab. The mother, women’s shoes as we would find, black trousers, patterned shirt, smaller hijab but still all covered. For the daughter, she shops at Ye Gap and looks much as do our girls in London, west.’

  As a parting gesture to cultural equivalency, and as an economy measure against hairdressing costs, I suggest to Gillian that she might like to sport a hijab too, but I only receive ye withering look for my consideration.

  We are sailing through this full moon night tonight so that tomorrow at dawn we should see the sun rise over the Bosphorus to our starboard and the Golden Horn in first light to our port, all before Istanbul reawakens for another day. At midnight, as watch changes from Theo to Gillian, the first yellow glow of Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul lights up the horizon off the bows. The moon is happy and bright, the sea at rest and the sails full. We are all excited about the dawn; even Theo stays awake.

  Chapter Fourteen

  CONSTANTINOPLE, THE DIPLOMATIC ROUND

  1 4 MAY - 13 JULY 1810 | 10-30 JUNE 2009

  Like Vasco da Gama the Salsette arrived off Seraglio Point, at the entrance to the Golden Horn of Istanbul, at dawn. Looking over the rails Byron would have seen Constantinople’s skyline much the same as we see old Istanbul’s now. Walking over to the other rail the Bosphorus itself then was much as it is now, save for on its banks an almost empty Asian side and only the Frank district of Pera its European side.

  As Byron gazed that morning on the massive city walls surrounding the Great Palace, now the Topkapi Palace, and the mosques of Sultan Ahmed, Santa Sofia and Sokollu Mehmet, eleven minarets in all, he already knew he was looking at a Forbidden City. Christians were not allowed in, except, as we shall see twice, in exceptional circumstances. The contrast with Athens could not have been more stark, for here indeed was Athens’s domineering capital city, and unlike Athens the seat of current glory, its antiquities not in ruins but in daily use, its buildings massive in scale and merit and confidence. It was only later that Byron saw Constantinople as Byzantium and the glory that was Greece.

  A fortnight later Byron rode around the outside Seraglio part of these city walls, which in 1810 stretched for twenty-two kilometres. He wrote to his mother: ‘the ride by the walls of the city on the land side is beautiful, imagine, four miles of immense triple battlements covered with Ivy, surmounted with 218 towers, and on the other side of the road Turkish burying grounds (the loveliest spots on earth) full of enormous cypresses. I have seen the ruins of Athens, of Ephesus, and Delphi, I have traversed great part of Turkey and many other parts of Europe and some of Asia, but I never beheld a work of Nature or Art, which yielded an impression like the prospect on each side, from the Seven Towers to the End of the Golden Horn.’

  In Constantinople proper they could not stay, so instead they were shuffled off to Pera, the area on the other side of the Golden Horn but still on the European side of the Bosphorus, an area the Ottomans had condescended to give the Genoese so they could trade with them without having to look at them and their disgusting Christian habits.

  As Byron and Hobhouse were soon to discover it was not just the City that was Forbidden, but a whole host of proscriptions were also concocted by a rigidly stratified and decaying society. They were Franks, at the bottom of Ottoman society’s pile, and so were fully exposed to its form of justice, and tempering justice with mercy was not an Ottoman concept then, nor much of a Turkish concept now. As they took their first steps ashore they saw two dogs eating a corpse.

  We know not what the corpse had done, but we can be reasonably sure he was beheaded, probably arbitrarily by a janissary on the spot, and probably for some minor indiscretion. In those days we whisked them off to Australia, the Ottomans merely chopped off their heads; the reader can decide who had the brighter future.

  By 1810 the Ottoman Empire was already two hundred and fifty years past its Suleyman peak, and was by then well frayed at the edges. It had also become a most unattractive regime, its aesthetic glories long past, its religious benevolence taken to the wrong conclusions, and its rule throughout its empire maintained by corruption, greed and random, and thus terrifying, cruelty. Ali Pasha’s fiefdom of Albania was a metaphor for Sultan Mahmoud II’s Ottoman Empire as a whole.

  Soon after Byron saw the dogs eat the corpse he was walking with Hobhouse when they came across another corpse lying in the street. Hobhouse recorded that ‘he was on his belly with his head off lying between his legs, face upwards. The skin was off his legs and arms by bastinado or burning. He had been a Greek Cogia Basha. His face was black and he seemed to have been dead a week at least.’The beheadings had their own subtleties: the head placed between the legs face down was the most demeaning while face up was a stage less demeaning, the head under the arm, left or right, the face this way and that, all had their subtexts. On another occasion Byron was walking with Chamier when they came upon an execution, and Chamier wrote that ‘...the beheaded criminal was lying in the front of the execution-office, with his head placed between his thighs, and only one human being near. Lord Byron looked with horror at the appalling scene. Not far from this exhibition stood a melancholy looking Turk, endeavouring to scare away some dogs; but his attempts were fruitless, for, unmindful of our presence, they rushed at the body, and began lapping the blood which still oozed from the neck. I never remember to have shuddered with so cold a shudder as I did at that moment; and Lord Byron, who ejaculated a sudden “Good God!” turned abruptly away.’

  This decapitocracy was carried out with industrial scale and efficiency. Sultan Mahmoud II, whom Byron was to meet in six weeks time, took fright at the growing influence of the janissaries and decided to... decapitate them, not as a body - as it were - but literally one by one. In one single day twenty thousand janissaries were said to have been beheaded in the Beyazit Tower. Now a janissary was not some sort of conquered serf amazed he had lived as long as he had, but a big strong guard - that was the whole point of him - and one wonders what force it must have taken to line up twenty thousand, presumably reluctant, janissaries and make them stick their necks out for their executioners’ convenience. A calculator will tell you that that’s fourteen janissaries done for each minute, non-stop for twenty- four hours. One wonders: how many executioners did they need? How many swords did it take, how many swipes per head, how to keep the swords sharp? And then, having severed head from body, what to do with the heads? And the bodies? And the blood - surely there can only be so many dogs with a constant appetite.

  I’m afraid I become rather transfixed by the whole episode - in a grisly kind of way as Dame Edna would say - and so go to the Beyazit Tower, now rebuilt in stone, to investigate. Strange and stranger still. The tow
er is one hundred metres high and only about fifteen metres across. It was known as the Fire Tower as it was used to look out for fires, of which there were many, and so alert the firemen accordingly. The tower is in the grounds of Istanbul University, scenes of recent riots when the socialist women students demanded the right to wear a headscarf, Ataturk having banned headscarves in public buildings ninety odd years ago; the very concept of reactionary socialist women students would have appealed to my friend Byron enormously.

  Anyway, the upshot of this little local difficulty is that I am met at the university gates by a particularly scruffy looking young man I presume is an unwashed student. He tells me the grounds are closed, I tell him I’m a writer and want to see the Beyazit Tower, even if only to photograph it from the outside.

  ’You old student?’ he asks

  ’No.’

  ’Old teacher?’

  ’No. Old, yes. Teacher, no’

  He softens. ‘Not difficult go tower. I am policeman. What you name?’

  ’Ian.’

  ’Mine Bulent.’

  We shake hands and so my secret policeman’s tour begins. On the way there, walking through lovely dappled parkland, I learn that the students have recently been provoked by Greek agitators, normally they are good women. I ask if there are many female students - only male ones are visible - and he says ‘too many’ but this often doesn’t mean ‘too many’ but ‘quite a lot’; I take it he means ‘too many’.Nevertheless he is quite charming and helpful, as charming and helpful as only a secret policeman can be.

  The tower is closed to the public but the big bronze Arabic-inscribed front gate is unlocked and he pushes it open and follows me in. The stairs rise steeply around the walls on to the first floor - there are four floors - but this door is locked and we can’t go up any higher. Bulent points upwards and says ‘Same, same’.

  I think what must have happened - the only way it could have happened - is that the twenty thousand janissaries were lined up outside and pushed inside, like Tokyo commuters, by an overwhelming number of guards or soldiers. The press of bodies had only one way to go, to the top of the wooden tower. There are Aztec pyramid sacrifice overtones here. Once at the top, on the lookout platform, it would be quite easy for a team of executioners already there to wield their mighty swords and the heads would plop down to the ground below,in full view of course of the living janissaries awaiting their turn to the top of the helter-skelter. But wouldn’t twenty thousand heads,never mind headless bodies, makes quite a mound? And how did the executioners change shifts, and swords? And who was rounding up the dogs to eat up the mess?

  Sultan Mahmoud II, the one who ordered the Beyazit massacre,also assassinated his predecessor, Sultan Selim III, but the latter was no slouch in the beheading department either. It was a law that Franks could not wear yellow footwear. On Selim’s first day in office he decided to leave the Great Palace incognito to walk in the streets. He saw a Greek with yellow shoes and ordered his beheading there and then, and stayed to watch too. Another rule was that a Christian could not cross the street in front of a Turk. One evening Selim was out incognito again, and two Franks unwittingly did just that. Selim ordered the usual punishment but was hurriedly told that the man was an officer of the English ship HMS Sea Horse, and the lady a Greek of some renown, and that they meant no offence to an ally of the English. The officer was let free but the poor woman was given a good, well bad, cudgelling.

  I’m sorry to bang on about this, but just one more, this one from the first sultan, Mehmet II, who rather set the scene. The artist Gentile Bellini was showing him his drawing The Beheading of John the Baptist. The sultan took one look at the severed head, and said something like’ no, no, they don’t look like that, the skin wraps in, not spreads out’ and ordered the janissary standing next to him to cut off the head of the slave standing next to him. It is not thought Bellini painted another beheading, in spite of this lesson in still life, as it were.

  The death penalty was abolished in Turkey in 2004 as part of the European Union accession process, but there is still a certain menace in the offing. While Byron was appalled at the way the ruling class treated the lesser orders, the writer was appalled at the way they treat animals now, except, strangely enough, pigeons, which they see not as flying rats but as cuddly grey lovebirds who must be fed constantly in case they starve. One can still see the Ottoman inheritance everywhere in the military posturing and the love of bureaucracy. The largest, and still conscripted, land army in Europe flies the biggest blood red flags from every hilltop (one is never out of sight of an enormous blood red flag); submarines ghost up the Dardanelles, turn around and ghost back down again; camouflaged helicopters and worse crisscross the skies; there are at least eleven different police forces (twelve if you include the Campus Corps above); armed guards - modern janissaries - patrol inside and outside every shopping centre, museum and art gallery, public building and train station; and having navigated oneself through the sentries onto the train the ticket inspector is dressed like a five star general. The country sports a worrying level of nationalism. As for the bureaucracy, I won’t bore you with the minutiae but it took five hours to check Vasco da Gama into the country, and I’m told it will take five more to check her out. The harbourmaster looks like an admiral of the fleet; the health inspector looks like he is about to operate; the immigration officer looks like an infantry commander; and the customs man looks like a royal marine. And the undercurrent of be-headings is still somewhere down in the psyche: I saw two graffiti of be-headings, both in red paint with blood spurting out of the recently opened necks, both with slogans against the imagined victim - one rather well drawn, as Hobhouse would have said. It’s hard to put one’s finger on it, but there is something profoundly unspiritual about the place, if one can be profoundly unspiritual.

  I digress again. Having navigated the corpse and hounds - not the pub, the street scene at Pera - Byron and Hobhouse set about finding lodgings. Unlike in Athens where they had had to take up lodgings in a private house, in Pera several inns were established to cater for the wandering Franks. Hobhouse said their inn ‘was situated at the corner of the main street of Pera, where four ways meet’, but what with the fire of 1836, the catastrophic earthquake of 1896 and the general development of Pera into the fine area it is today all trace of their inn has long since disappeared.

  Byron was keen to settle into the Diplomatic Round and his first call was to the British Embassy, known then as the English Palace. It had been built by Lord Elgin fifteen years before and was a copy of Broomhall, his stately home in Scotland. Other diplomats to the Porte suggested Elgin had the English Palace built on the highest hill in Pera so he could watch the movements of the Ottoman navy from his bedroom window. Unfortunately Elgin’s embassy was burned to the ground in the 1836 fire, but was replaced over the next twelve years with an equally splendid building, the one still standing today, modelled on Sir Charles Barry’s Reform Club in London. When it was reopened it was renamed the British Embassy, but everyone locally still called it the English Palace. After the 1923 republic was established, and Ankara deemed to be the capital, to soothe Turkish - and presumably Scottish and Welsh - sensitivities, it changed its name again to Pera House, but of course everyone locally still calls it the English Palace. These familiar names have a habit of sticking around. As I’m sure Hobhouse, thumbs in waistcoat pockets, would have told all concerned, they were not in Constantinople at all but in Istanbul, and had been since 1453, but deaf ears would have heard his advice. Constantinople it was; just as if you were born and live there Bombay it is too, with the added satisfaction at looking quizzically at the browbeaten and ask ‘where?’ when they mention what locals call ‘the M-word’.

  At the English Palace Byron saw Stratford Canning, just twenty-four but already chargé d ‘affaires and under-secretary to the ambassador, Sir Robert Adair. The Salsette, which had been sent to bring Adair home, wa
s anchored in view beneath them, and once she sailed Canning would be de facto ambassador. It was the start of his fine career as well as a delicate and active time in Anglo-Turkish diplomacy, especially as the British navy had fired on Constantinople the year before in retaliation for the Turkish interference on the French side in the Ionian Islands. Adair and Canning had negotiated the Treaty of the Dardanelles in 1809 which ended the Anglo-Turkish War, a sub-war of the Napoleonic Wars. As Lord Stratford de Redcliffe he would return four more times to Constantinople, ultimately as full ambassador. His cousin was the future prime minister George Canning, and between them the cousins Canning played significant roles in the struggle for Greek independence.

  Adair, on the other hand, had rather blotted his copybook. Although a fine diplomat by day, by night he turned into something slightly stranger. Word around the diplomatic campfire was that he had gone troppo, which translated from the Australian means he had turned into an eccentric form of native, his eccentricity being summed up by the ditty:

  Adair delights his manhood to display