In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  And today?

  From the Black Sea, the first thing one sees are the green hills of Kilyos, behind them the elegant houses and gardens where Irfan Orga once spent the last, light summer of his childhood, and amid them the modern suburbs of Istanbul, lying in folds across the hillsides like cotton wool. We are sailing into the Bosphorus. The villas glide by left and right, one more extravagant than the other, with carved wooden balconies, stoops and terraces looking out on the water, brightly coloured gardens, trees, a village square, a minaret, a little wharf, a few cafés, a beach.

  It is 7 a.m., but the sun is already hot. We pass a tiny fishing boat, the nets half spread in the water, three tanned and weathered men wave to the girls on the Passat. The great bridge between Europe and Asia lies in the distance, a flimsy thread being crossed by hundred of bugs and beetles.

  We approach the heart of the city. I have said so before: here, time obviously stopped in 1948. The dozens of ferries full of fathers with briefcases and mothers with shopping, the rusty, worldly-wise freighters from Sebastopol, Odessa and Piraeus, the bright-red tugs, the oil fumes, the glistening water: everything exudes the spirit of work and trade, no frills.

  The European part of the city resembles old Barcelona, except for the occasional, echoing call to prayer. The markets are full of shouts and aromas, the stalls overflowing with milk and honey, bulging with herbs, chicken and fish, with cherries the size of plums, plums the size of apples, with vegetables of a thousand varieties. On Istiklal Caddesi, boys surf on the bumper of an old tram, their feet sliding over the rails. In the middle of the day, loudspeakers everywhere issue the call to prayer. This is Muslim country, yes, but the baroque shopping gallery where I have lunch could just as easily be Brussels, or Milan. Istanbul, like Odessa, is an amalgamated city, a city that must come to terms with all these different identities, without choosing one or the other.

  I stay at the Pera Palas, an antique hotel built in 1892 as an extension of the Orient Express, a cool resting place after the exhausting train trip through the Balkans. The building breathes a nostalgic chic, an ancient lift creaks up and down all day, right through the middle of the stairwell. Gold and marble glisten in the immense halls. In the big, flaking bathrooms you can sit on the same toilet as Greta Garbo, stare out of the same window as Empress Sissi of Austria, and lie in the same bed as King Zog of Albania. The TV is turned up loudly in the room where Trotsky slept: 204.

  The loveliest suite here is held eternally for Mustafa Kemal Paşsa – known from 1934 as Kemal Atatürk, the ‘father of all Turks’. A porter takes me by the hand, lets me peek around the door. It is a small, silent sanctuary: a bed, a bathroom, two easy chairs, a desk with a couple of photographs and some papers. So this was the Istanbul pied-à-terre of the military dictator, this hero of the First World War who reined in the chaos of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, drove out the foreign occupiers and led the country powerfully and energetically into the modern age.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, Atatürk was able to impose secularisation simply by decree, an unparalleled revolution in the Islamic world: women were no longer allowed to wear veils, men no longer the fez, polygamy was banned, women were given the vote, the Islamic lunar calendar was replaced with the Gregorian, the Arabic script with the Roman alphabet. Instead of Islamic law, Swiss law was adopted, almost word for word, Sunday became the official day of rest, all Koran schools were closed and Islam was to respect all secular legislation.

  In recent decades the father of the fatherland has been honoured more than ever, despite – or perhaps because of – the country's new Islamisation. One statue after another was raised, his portrait hung in every café and classroom. He was seen as the symbol of the great leap forward, the containment of the power of the believers, the definitive break with the ‘sick man of Europe’, as the Ottoman Empire was once called. Still, Atatürk was himself the product of that very same empire, an empire that was in reality less feeble than was often supposed. Like France, for example, Turkey had started a programme of modernisation as early as the mid-nineteenth century. All manner of reforms later ascribed to Atatürk actually began under the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II: the reform of the educational system, the modernisation of the army, the reorganisation of the legislative system and government finances, the pushing back of the influence of the Muslim elite, the westernisation of clothing, the building of roads and railways.

  It was under Abdülhamid that a direct overland connection was established with Western Europe: the first Orient Express steamed into the city on 12 August, 1888. The Pera Palas became the outpost for the Western elite. During those same years, eighteen new technical schools were established, as well as a university and a school of medicine. Atatürk's own youth is a shining example of the possibilities offered by modernised Ottoman education around 1900.

  Atatürk's separation of church and state – Islam was to be practised only as a private faith, without legal or political influence – was also, in fact, an enactment of existing opinion. In the nineteenth century in particular, many Islamic thinkers became inspired by the modernisation of the West. They arrived at standpoints, based on the Koran, that were in many ways comparable to modern Western thought. They entertained a great many ideas about intellectual freedom, about the role of the individual and about the separation of church and state.

  Alongside all this there is also Atatürk the despot, and he too, more than sixty years after his death, exerts at least equal influence on Turkish society. The country's secular character, so hated by the religious and the fundamentalist, was jealously guarded by the army. In 1961 the military did not bat an eyelid when it hanged the democratically elected prime minister, Adnan Menderes, for ‘corruption’ and for ‘conspiring with the Islamic parties’. During a military coup in 1980, thousands of opponents were detained without due process. As late as 1998, the generals, acting ‘in the name of Atatürk’, brusquely shoved aside the first democratically elected Islamic government. The Turks even have their own jargon for this: the ‘deep state’ as opposed to the ‘official-but-superficial state’, a ‘soft coup’, ‘pasha coups’ or ‘media coups’.

  It is 7 p.m. on Friday, rush hour for the ferries. People come pouring up the gangplanks carrying bags, toolboxes, baskets full of chickens, fishing gear, bicycles, even tables and chairs. Vendors of roasted ears of corn, sunflower seeds, peeled cucumbers and fresh fish jostle each other on the quayside. There are people hawking dancing puppets, breathtakingly pink children's petticoats, light-blue plastic birds with purple feathers. A blind man plays the violin, his friend sings a sorrowful song into a badly distorting microphone.

  The toy vendors have two new dolls: an electric blonde doll that rocks a baby, and a green commando that crawls along with his rifle, producing regular flashes of light and deadly sounds. A little further along a man is sitting beside old bathroom scales: for five cents you can weigh yourself. The little fishing boats moored along the quay bob on the waves, the crew are roasting fish on grills set up in the middle of the deck, hopping like acrobats with every wave that washes in. The beggars are out in full force. Within a minute I am accosted by an old man, a woman with one leg and a pitiful young girl with a baby. The fishmongers shout, the electronic dolls quack and rattle, the ships’ horns blast, the blind man sings through it all: this is the quay by the bridge across the Golden Horn at 7 p.m. on a Friday.

  The ferry to Büyükada, one of the islands in the Sea of Marmara, is a rusty tub full of people excited to be escaping the city, even if only for a bit. I start talking to a young student. She tells me the same stories about newcomers that one hears often in Amsterdam, only these immigrants are from her own country. She is frightened by the advancing countryside, she sees tens of thousands of young people moving to the city each year, full of illusions, only to become hopelessly bogged down after a time, without work, without a family. Fundamentalist groups are popping up all over. ‘Istanbul is losing itself,’ she says. ‘There is no more movement, no more
change. Everything has become frozen by the polarisation in the city between rich and poor, and between modern thinking and fundamentalism. The situation is becoming more tense every day.’

  Soon afterwards the city would literally quake and tear, thousands of people would die, but that was all still to come and we were able to enjoy the evening without a real care. A cheerful man is trying to sell knives, he demonstrates the quality of the blades by artfully cutting strips from a plastic bottle. Tea and fruit juice are served in huge quantities. A few boys on the afterdeck raise their voices in song. The air is balmy, the sea is dazzling. And meanwhile Istanbul runs on along the Asiatic shore, the city rolling on between the coast and the hills like a broad, greyish-white band, dozens of kilometres, hundreds of thousands of apartment blocks, ten, twelve million people who dream and want to do something with their lives, crowded together at the brim of the Asian continent.

  One Sunday I wander a bit aimlessly through Fener, the old Greek neigh-bourhood. Some of the houses here are still wooden. In a square there is a tiny carousel, pushed by its owner. A group of children waits excitedly, a few coins clenched in their fists. According to my city guide, the names of these little streets are actually of an unparalleled poetry: Street of the Thousand Earthquakes, the Lane of the Bristly Beard, the Alley of the Chicken Which Cannot Fly, Plato's Cul-de-Sac, the Street of Nafie with the Golden Hair, the Street of Ibrahim of the Black Hell. Tantalising aromas waft over from an antique bakery. When I stop for a moment, the baker comes outside and hands me a sweet pretzel. He will not accept my money: ‘This is how we make them, stranger. Taste it!’

  Istanbul is still the centre of the Orthodox Church. Strictly speaking, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople holds the same position as the Pope, but it takes me a long time to find the Orthodox Vatican tucked away in a corner of this working-class neighbourhood. The complex is surrounded by thick walls. In the church a priest is being ordained, the pews are full and in the courtyard families are standing around talking. The atmosphere is festive. The priests are all elderly men, the seminary was closed thirty years ago by the Turks, but it seems as though there's a revival in progress. The patriarchate still looks like a fort, though its perimeter walls have been daubed with graffiti: ‘Long live our Islamic struggle!’

  Amid this intimate gathering it seems almost unimaginable that seventy-five years ago, at the time of the 1924 census, a quarter of the population of Istanbul was still Greek Orthodox. In 1955 a veritable pogrom took place: thousands of Muslims went into the Greek neighbourhood, shattered windows, looted and destroyed. Dozens of Orthodox churches were torched. The police did nothing. In 1974, at the time of the Cyprus crisis, tens of thousands of Greeks were run out of town again. Today there are no more than 3,000 left.

  It is bizarre, but true: this little group of respectable Sunday Greeks, this remote little church, these elderly priests are all that remains of the enormous Greek Orthodox power centre that was once Constantinople, of the unique amalgam of European and Eastern culture that blossomed here for at least a thousand years.

  In some ways the Ottoman Empire was like the European colonial empires, but lacked one feature: the colonial disdain with which Europe looked down on other peoples. The Ottomans were not particularly interested in whether one was a Muslim or a Christian. Jews and Christians were generally left in peace. Promising young Jewish and Christian people were sometimes converted to Islam, then given influential positions in the army or the bureaucracy. For the rest, however, the religious freedom of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Istanbul was reminiscent of that in Amsterdam. While dissenters were being persecuted elsewhere in Europe, in the Ottoman Empire they were free to practise their religion. The Ottoman borders were open to Jewish refugees, and they made a welcome contribution to the economy. When the Italian travel writer Edmondo De Amicis stopped on the Galata Bridge in 1896, he saw a motley crowd passing by: Greeks, Turks, Armenians, ‘a Muhammadan woman on foot, a veiled slave girl, a Greek woman with long, wavy hair topped with a little red cap, a Maltese woman hidden behind her black faletta, a Jewess in the ancient costume of her nation, a Negress wrapped in a multi-coloured Cairo shawl, an Armenian woman from Trebizond, all veiled in black …’

  Almost half of that same Istanbul in which young Irfan Orga grew up consisted of non-Muslims. According to the 1893 census, almost five million Jews and Christians lived among the seventeen million Ottomans. Like the Habsburg Empire, it was a multinational. And in some ways, particularly when it became modernised, it was perhaps more European than present-day Turkey.

  The question, therefore, is: where lies the greatest barrier between Turkey and the rest of Europe? Is it actually the country's traditional Muslim character? Is it not, rather, Atatürk's staunchly nationalist and dictatorial modernisation that blocks a lasting rapprochement with modern-day Europe? Or, to put it differently: does the problem really have to do with Muhammad? Does it not have just as much to do with Atatürk?

  It was nineteenth-century nationalism that put an end to the tolerance of the Ottoman Empire, and by the start of the twentieth century the tension had risen to breaking point in Anatolia. But it was only under Atatürk that ethnic cleansing was adopted as government policy. His modern Turkey was to form a strong national and ethnic unit, he considered the Ottomans’ multinationalism sentimental and obsolete, religious and ethnic diversity only undermined the country's identity and security. In the 1920s, after Greece had vainly tried to establish control over large parts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, Atatürk imposed a forced exchange between Greece and Turkey, an ethnic cleansing of unheard-of proportions: more than a million Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Anatolia were sent to Greece, almost 400,000 Greek Muslims were transported to Turkey.

  Their fate was mild compared to that of the Armenians. In the course of conflicts and deportations in 1915, even before Atatürk came to power, an estimated 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians were killed, a case of genocide vehemently denied to this day by the Turkish government. Merely mentioning this genocide, the first of the twentieth century, still leads to indictments and trials. The veiling of the past, the fatal forgetting of which Primo Levi wrote, is here the duty of every patriotic citizen.

  All this had – and still has – an effect on Istanbul. It is a city which, despite the overwhelming beauty of the Bosphorus, despite the tenfold growth of its population in the last half of the twentieth century, despite the influx of tens of thousands of immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, despite the Hagia Sophia and all the other evidence of 1,500 years of culture, is losing its cosmopolitan character and is in the process of becoming, in spirit, a provincial city. The Jews have left for Israel, the Greeks for Greece, the country's political power has moved to Ankara, the merchants have been scattered across the face of the earth.

  All cities tell a story, and the story of Istanbul is above all one of shifting emphases and of vulnerability, no matter how international the metropolis might seem. In 1200, this was Europe's absolute centre of power. Today it is a remote corner, a poor, rapidly expanding Third World city, a symbol of glory past, ties forgotten, tolerance lost.

  Chapter THIRTY-NINE

  Kefallonia

  IN THE CRETAN VILLAGE OF ANOGIA, THE DAY BEGINS WITH THE crowing of roosters. A man comes by with a megaphone, trying, even at this early hour, to sell his potatoes, a whole wagonful. Then comes the clanging and bleating of a herd of goats, the shouting of a Gypsy woman with a cart full of clothing, then a car loaded with plastic buckets and basins, and then the day has truly arrived.

  The old men move slowly from their houses. They carry sticks, they wear beards, black caps, stiff, heavy coats, blue jeans, every season and every age is tucked away in their appearance. The communists sit in front of their own café, where Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Stalin have their regular places on the wall. A busload of German tourists pulls in, they disappear into the restaurant which bears the sign ‘ICH SPRECHE DEUTSCH’, and everyone on the village square n
ods to them and greets them in a most amiable fashion. A skinned sheep is slung from the back of a truck, its head rolls over the ground. The old women are doing their errands. You can still see which one was the prettiest fifty years ago, if only from the way the old men treat this bent and bowed Calliope.

  Fifty years ago: when they were still young, when Anogia was wiped off the face of the earth.

  When evening comes the moon rises at the top of the main street like a monstrous disc. Anogia lies on the flanks of the Ida range. The houses are white and square, the streets slope down with the hillside, there is a square with plane trees, and everywhere there are tourist shops with colourful weaving.

  Back behind the village is a museum displaying the naïve art of a talented shepherd, Chrilios Skoulas. The paintings are huge: pictures of the village with all its streets, and of the painter and his wife posing peacefully in front of their house; of the painter walking through the woods in a flurry of snow, a lamb draped around his neck; of para-troopers landing in green uniforms, the shepherds and other partisans shooting them as they descend, they fall, the green uniforms tumble, the dogs lick their blood; of the village with fire leaping from every roof, airplanes, dead people everywhere, old men being chased into houses that are burning like torches, women and children being led away and the partisans trying to rescue them. And then there is a huge tableau of peace, of the men and women who finally returned, of the church with the souls of the dead floating above it.

  The present-day mayor of Anogia was ten years old at the time. All he remembers is the smoke and the smell of fire. He and a group of young boys found a cave to hide in; then they roamed through the mountains with the partisans for three weeks, living on cheese and goat's milk. ‘When we finally came back to our village, there was not one stone on top of the other. There was this strange smell that we couldn't place. Then we saw the bodies everywhere, swollen bodies, soaked from the rain. No one said anything, no one wept, we stayed absolutely quiet. Talking about it now, my eyes fill with tears. But then we were petrified.’ He and his younger sister decided to go to a neighbouring village, to see if their grandfather was still alive. Along the way they saw a man lying under a felled tree, a little boy in his arms. ‘They looked as if they were sleeping.’ Weeping, they ran on. Their grandfather was still there.