Joy Unconfined

by Ian Strathcarron

  From window casements, and across the way

  Woos some sultana’s fascinated eyes,

  Convinced the surest argument is size

  Hobhouse later heard from the French ambassador that ‘Adair was a passionate man who disgraced himself by following the servant maids of Pera, which shocked the Mussulman gravely...’

  I was particularly looking forward to having lunch with Canning’s successor, the current consul general at the English Palace, Jessica Hand. A disadvantage of travelling away for a long time - and just as Istanbul marked the first year of the Grand Tour, so it marked the first year of the re-Tour - is falling out of touch with events back home, and if somewhere foreign for any length of time I always pop into the embassy to say hello and pick up the local sitrep. No matter how many Margaret Becketts they throw at them, the Foreign Office staff are always last pockets of resistance. The embassy and ambassador had to follow the capital when it moved to Ankara, leaving the consul general with the English Palace by day and the vitality of Istanbul by night. The ambassador no doubt regrets.

  Apart from her current posting,she shares with Canning multilingual abilities and professional entanglements with the Russians. Russia’s shifting alliances with the French and Turks occupied Canning right up to the Crimea War, and Hand, having just spent three and half years in Moscow, foresees the consequences of us ignoring Russia’s current strategy of European energy monopoly and control, and sees us doing just that. She has a mid-career, no-nonsense air, and we both agree that there’s no point in trying to jolly the Russians along and that the only thing they understand is a good clip round the ear - not her exact words at all, I hasten to add.

  We discuss the current preoccupations of the Anglo-Turkish relationship: EU accession, the hijab question, and - inevitably - the Iraq debacle. I report on my lunch the previous day with a Turkish grandee who is helping me with meeting family members of the ex-sultanate and who seemed to be particularly well connected and informed. The Turkish dilemma boils down to how grise should be the military’s éminence. He made some interesting points: the government is at heart fundamentalist and becoming worse and the army secular and becoming impatient, and the dilemma for the progressives is that while they are naturally wary of the coup-inclined generals and military dictatorships, they need the generals to keep the sharia- inclined headbangers in line. For the secular traditionalists, and the country is split down the middle, it is the generals who represent continuity while the headbangers snuggle up to the mullahs, and as for the religious traditionalists, well their preferred options are degrees of theocracy. Nothing is what it appears, and dilemmas abound. In this context the hijab issue assumes an importance way beyond a piece of silk that covers the head, for as one can see everywhere in central Istanbul once that goes, everything else follows.

  Everyone intelligent I’ve ever met has been horrified by our involvement in Iraq, and for the staff in the Foreign Office it has been an easily and well-predicted disaster which will take generations to overcome. The attaché in Tirana told me that every meeting with an Albanian official starts with a tirade against Bush and his running dog Blair, and Albania is not devoutly Islamic. Jessica confirms the dodgy dossiers, the lies to parliament, the deceptions of the public, Bush and Blair praying together, all made it look to Islamists like the Tenth Crusade. To me it was all about that moment when Blair received a standing ovation in Congress, and the look in his eyes on close up TV; we went to war for his vainglory. Jessica saw the scene too.

  For those working at the English Palace all this has added piquancy because the building itself was bombed in a terrorist attack in 2003 which killed sixteen souls, and of course many more Muslims than Christians. Meanwhile the Bush/Cheney masterminds were promoting their policy of ‘soft Islam’, whereby Turkey, being softly Islamic compared to its neighbours, would do Bush’s bidding in the region. As Jessica points out, you can no more be softly Islamic than a little bit pregnant, and the regional reaction to this bright idea and the hostile noises coming from the EU about accession are pushing Turkey towards its neighbour Iran.

  I could not help but ask about her, our, current ambassador. ‘Nick Baird?’ she asks. ‘That’s the one,’ I reply, ‘and I really think he should smarten himself up. On your website he is pictured in an open neck shirt and calling himself Nick Baird. Now I’m sure off duty all his friends and family call him Nick, but his proper name is Nicholas and if on duty he is to represent HMG in a country where a headscarf is a can of worms he should certainly wear a suit and tie; to do otherwise makes him look like the sort of twerp who doesn’t understand what duty means at all. Turkish men are notably well dressed, even if often in a uniform. I think it shows a lack of respect to turn up representing our country looking like a Friday afternoon in Basingstoke and using a nick-name, as it were.’

  By a subtle twist of the eyebrows methinks she agrees, but decorum forbids etcetera, and I’m sure this sense of decorum means that when she is an ambassadress she will not be calling herself Jessie and sporting a boob tube.

  The languid Ottoman sense of time and protocol meant that Byron had a long time to wait until he could leave Constantinople. As soon as the Salsette arrived, Adair had sought Sultan Mahmoud II’s permission to take his leave, but before an audience with the sultan was granted there had to be a dress rehearsal with the vice-sultan. These things took time; two months of labyrinthine negotiations between seeking permission for an audience with Sultan Mahmoud and the actual audience itself.

  But in the meanwhile there were exotic diversions. Whereas Athens had been as devoid of entertainment as any other small provincial town, in the capital there were endless amusements. They saw near- naked greased men wrestling (a tradition that continues), Whirling Dervishes whirling (since banned by Ataturk along with beards, fezzes, the Arabic alphabet, and - incidentally - women covering themselves up), and an early version of Madame JoJo’s (of which there are a dozen of current version). In a classic piece of Hobhouse shock-horror we hear they ‘went to a wine house of Galata. Hearing music, went into a room like a hall with a gallery all round it. This was a wine-house and here I saw a boy dancing in a style indescribably beastly, scarcely moving from one place, but making a thousand lascivious motions with his thighs, loins, and belly. The boys Greek with very thick and long hair. An old wretch striking a guitar and singing kept close to the dancer, and at the most lecherous moments cried out. Also they spread a mat and, putting on a kind of shawl, performed an Alexandrian woman’s dance and seemed as if kissing. One of Mr Adair’s Janissaries, who talks English was with us. I asked him if these boys would not be hanged in England. “Oh yes, directly. De Turk take and byger dem d’ye see?”‘

  But Byron’s favourite days out were to ride north of the city to the beautiful Valley of Sweet Waters, and in particular to visit Lady Wortley Montagu’s old house high in the village of Belgrade. The house itself has long been lost and the valley formalised as the Belgrade Forest National Park, and a visit there jumping on and off ferries along the Bosphorus makes for a fine day out from the scurry and scuttle of Istanbul. In Byron’s time Lady Wortley Montagu’s old house belonged to the embassy’s chief dragoman, and Byron must have loved wiling away his time in the house where one of his favourites used to live.

  Mary Wortley Montagu had been the wife of the ambassador ninety years before Byron’s visit, and her friendship with Alexander Pope and her letters from Constantinople had drawn Byron to her. These letters have now been gathered into the book Turkish Embassy Letters and make delightful reading. Her style of writing is the opposite of e-mails, from the days when people could say ‘today I’m going to write to my sister,’ and ‘today’ meant all day. The letter would then start ‘Dear Lady Mar, it is not without fulsome joy, my dear sister, that...’

  She had great curiosity about the Orient and learned Turkish and would wear a veil and so disguised enter the Forbidden City. She became friend
s with various sultanas who colluded in her disguise and led her past the eunuchs into the city’s hamams and harems, and so she wrote with a uniquely feminine perceptive view of Ottoman life. Incidentally, none of the sultanas was allowed to be Turkish, so with each generation the Turkish-ness of the sultans diluted. She came to see Islamic women not as the glorified slaves portrayed at large but as pampered enchantresses liberated from earthly pursuits and able to spend nearly all their time at leisure with occasional interruptions to become involved in the various stages of the child rearing process. She was under no illusions about the vipers’ nest that was harem politics; how the ‘wrong’ princes were regularly strangled; how the sultan’s mother chose her son’s entertainment, and the rewards that flowed back and forth should a son accrue; how the sultanas ran eunuchs and slaves to spread poison and intrigue. The Turks took to Lady Mary too, and the best portrait of her hangs in a kind of foreign heroes’ gallery in the Istanbul Library.

  Interestingly enough something in the Montagu gene pool has an affinity with Istanbul as a remote relative, Lord Montagu Douglas Scott, younger brother to the Duke of Buccleuch, is one of the most prominent Istanbul residents and, I hear on an unimpeachable grapevine, one of the world’s leading Orientalists. It’s rather fun having a triple barrelled name, like having a six cylinder motorcycle or twelve cylinder car, so delightfully unnecessary and so completely essential. My passport is bad enough, but with all his names and titles his passport must go on forever. We spent a delightfully Anglo-Oriental evening together. He came to Turkey thirty years ago on a school break, fell in love with the history, the culture, the people and his Turkish wife and has stayed here ever since. I tell him I know exactly what he means as the same thing happened to me in Kashmir, except religion and politics kicked me out and here I am circumnavigating, hedging my next incarnation bets, instead. I think it has something to do with re-incarnation, but being a sound Ottoman, John is not so sure.

  He founded Cornucopia magazine, a cross between an Istanbul Apollo and a Turkish Vanity Fair, which is a magazine you don’t throw away, indeed you collect, and a bit like a Rolls Royce or Land Rover most originals are still extant. Roumeli, that is Northern Turkey all the way from the Caspian to ‘end of empire’ and including Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli part of Greece, reminds him of the England of yesteryear, all ‘very Tin-Tin’ as he puts it. I can see the point: England, especially for those of us brought up post-war in the last shadows of empire and officer, that England has gone forever, replaced by poly- this and multi-that and if one prefers a traditionally ordered, well educated, polite and intact society one needs to live in somewhere like Roumeli.

  But, I say, I still just don’t get it: the fondness other people have for Turkey. John clearly loves it and has made it his life, I met the Californian artist Trici Venola who came here five years ago and wants to stay forever, I met my neighbour’s son Barney Fisher-Turner who loves it enough to stay, but I can’t wait to leave. I suggest it’s because I’ve always been on the wrong side of the Islam/Turkey divide: in India my sympathies lay with the Hindus and in Roumeli with the Greeks.

  If Lady Wortley Montagu could flit unnoticed in and out of the Forbidden City, Byron and Hobhouse had to apply for permission to visit the famous mosques and the Grand Bazaar. They enlisted the support of Canning to deal with the Porte bureaucracy, and a month later their permits arrived. But this was not the private tour Byron would have expected, and he had to join a Cook’s Tour of other Christians-under-sufferance, including Bathurst and Chamier and other officials from the English Palace.

  It would be fair to say Byron was unmoved by the royal mosques, largely because by 1810 they had long since passed their glory; in fact they were dishevelled and neglected. Going on a tour with the other Franks would not have cheered him up too much either. Neither Byron nor Hobhouse passed much comment on the mosques, but Mark Twain, who visited a generation later, said that Santa Sophia was ‘the rustiest old barn in heathendom’. He noted that ‘the perspective is marred everywhere by a web of ropes that suspend dingy, coarse oil lamps. Everywhere was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom; nowhere was there anything to win one’s love or challenge one’s admiration.’

  Fortunately it has all improved so much as to be unrecognisable. Santa Sofia is now the Hagia Sophia Museum and restoration is on a rolling basis. One can now sense it in its pomp as the Byzantine miracle; they say that just being there made one believe in a higher intelligence. I overhear a guide say that all mosques are round because of Santa Sophia and all churches have steeples because of the minarets on Aya Sophia, and that Gothic architecture came after the first crusaders saw filigree lace in Islamic designs and took the designs back to Europe. I’ll have to check on that one tomorrow. The Sultan Ahmed Mosque is now the Blue Mosque, and seems to be fully restored. Byron, and Mark Twain, thought the Suleymaniye Mosque the grandest of them all, and at the time of writing this was closed for a major renovation.

  They completed their tour of the mosques on 19 June, exactly a year to the day from when they left London on their Grand Tour. Funnily enough we are also in Istanbul on 19 June and that is also a year to the date from when we left Bucklers Hard on our re-Tour.

  That last year, however, had taken its toll on Hobhouse’s health, and he was now actively considering accompanying Adair all the way back to London, rather than spending the next winter with Byron in Athens. He had caught the clap in Cadiz while Byron was cavorting at the opera with Señorita Cordova; he had had a toothache since Smyrna; he had gone deaf for a week in Ephesus; and now in Constantinople he could not shake off what he thought was diarrhoea but sounds more like amoebic dysentery. Hobhouse had never treated the hardships of travel with Byron’s equanimity, and would sidle over to Fletcher and join in the grumble about tonight’s flea infested haystack. It might also have been grating on him by now that he was only there on Byron’s borrowed generosity, and may have become tired of this subtly unequal relationship with Byron’s coattails.

  On 10 July 1809 Adair’s big day with the sultan arrived. Fletcher must have woken Byron at 3.30 a.m. - or more likely Byron just stayed up until then - as by 4.30 a.m. he was ready in his full regimentals to join the embassy procession. It was ordered in line with strict protocol and hierarchy, and Byron wasn’t the main attraction, which would have set his mood back as much as the early hour. At its head, on foot, in their finest uniforms were the one hundred embassy janissaries in two lines, followed by Byron’s fellow swimmer Lieutenant Ekenhead on horseback leading twenty marching marines from the Salsette, and then a dozen embassy servants, in specially made yellow, gold and blue uniforms.

  Next came Adair’s detail, led by the embassy’s Master of Ceremonies and Pisani, the principal dragoman, ahead of two more of the Salsette’s officers leading fourteen sailors in two lines. The sailors - no doubt to much ribaldry from their shipmates - had been dressed up in red suits and fur hats, and formed an escort for Sir Robert on horseback. He was dressed in his best court dress, a bright green satin suit, and topped off with his turban of state. Only then did Byron appear, and on foot - insult after insult! - in a loose group with Canning, Bathurst, Hobhouse, the various consuls and functionaries from the embassy, the remaining officers from the Salsette, and lastly the British employees of the Levant Company.

  At the eastern shore of the Golden Horn, the sailors and marines crossed in the Salsette’s specially decked-out jolly-boat, Adair in the Master of Ceremonies’ barge, and Byron and the others in another of the sultan’s barges. As they passed the frigate, still anchored at Seraglio Point, the sun rose over the Asian side of the Bosphorus. The frigate herself was strung with colours and the yards manned, and as the ambassador passed she fired a seventeen-gun salute. Hobhouse reported that after the salute ‘the sun, seen red through the clouds of smoke, and giving to these clouds a fiery red dun colour, presented a scene most indescribable.’ As they disembarked the Salsette fired off another seven
teen rounds, this time to salute Sultan Mahmoud as he made his own way, in magnificent splendour, to the Seraglio.

  After half an hour they arrived at the first gate of the Topkapi Palace, the Baba Humayun or Sublime Gate. On their left was the Hagia Eirene or Church of the Divine Peace, founded by Justinian in 537 and now used by the janissaries as an arsenal. The procession swayed slowly up the hill to the next gate, the Baba-Salam, the Gate of Health and Felicity. Waiting for them there were the officers of the Porte, magnificently arraigned in silks and turbans.

  Byron was absorbing all the splendour, and whole scenes from the day’s events would make themselves known again in different parts of Don Juan. Through the next smaller court they saw the kitchens on one side, and ahead the Divan, where the sultan’s advisers held their council, on the other. Waiting for them was the vice-sultan, and behind him a whole host of his advisers, officers, secretaries and treasurers, as well as ambassadors from other Ottoman territories. Adair was invited to sit next to the vice-sultan and through the whispered translations of dragomen the business was transacted. The procession route is easily followed today, although be prepared for lesser processions from the cruise ship contingent led not by uniformed janissaries bearing a standard but by gnomish men in shorts holding up a company clipboard.

  At ten o’clock lunch was served. The ambassador and vice-sultan sat alone at an elevated table, and Byron, Hobhouse, Bathurst and Canning sat with high, but not highest, ranking, officers of the Porte. Lunch went on forever: twenty-two different courses, each consisting of only one food at a time, and at the end of it the assembled worthies were given a mass sprinkling of rose water.

  After lunch a message arrived that the sultan himself was now prepared to receive the ambassador and his suite. Following the ambassador, Byron was led out to the third gate, the Baba-Saadi or Gate of Happiness. All the British guests were given long sleeveless fur coats - this was noon in mid-July - so that they would be fit to sit before the sultan.