The Fracture Zone

by Simon Winchester

  She agreed readily, scenting a fascinating plan, as I knew she would. I told her that my approximate idea was to make a scimitar-shaped journey between Vienna and Istanbul,* the two cities whose competing empires had done so much to create the frictions and complications of the regions between. I hoped very much, I said, that we would reach the town from where I was telephoning, Skopje, in time to see the ending of the war that I had already seen begun.

  So might we meet, in a week’s time, say, in Vienna, at Frau Demel’s fussy and mirrored old Konditorei, behind the Hofburg? I needed to go to Vienna first, I added, because there was the possibility that I might win permission there to see one appropriately gruesome symbol of the landscape that lay beyond. I wanted to go to Vienna to see something that had not been seen publicly for a quarter of a century, and that had more than a little relevance to what was going on in the Balkans—the severed head of a long-dead Turk.

  2

  A Meeting with a Turkish Gentleman

  HAPPY IS THE COUNTRY, wrote George Bernard Shaw, that has no history.” And, by extension, unhappy are the Balkans, that have too much of it. To comprehend just why so much unhappiness, to begin any sort of understanding of the travails of this benighted place, one needs to do more than simply make a journey through its geography: It is essential also to make some kind of foray into its daunting chronology. And given that the story of the Balkans is, in essence, the story of the ebbing and flowing of the two great empires, Hapsburg and Ottoman, that vied for sovereignty over the lands between them, so it seemed to me at the start of this journey that our tour of Balkan history, as well as our venture into the Balkan landscape, should most properly begin in the Hapsburg’s once-great capital city, Vienna.

  So we began in the old coffeehouse in the Kohlmarkt (the city’s onetime cauliflower market), with a Kaffee brauner and a bright pink box of those silky-smooth chocolates known by the vaguely macabre—but when you see them oh-so-apposite—name of Katzenzungen or langues du chat (cats’ tongues). The scene could hardly have been more comfortably Viennese: The bustlingly starched waitresses were dealing with flotillas of sturdy, haughty, and obviously respectable matrons (most from Vienna, though some no doubt from Nebraska or New York). If I looked carefully I could see them glancing surreptitiously at themselves in the rococo-gilded mirrors, adjusting their hats, patting the buttons on their tightish brown tweed jackets to make sure that there was room for the anticipated mountain of whipped cream that would be served with the Kaffee mélange, or perhaps, if it was not too indecently early, for the iced mazagran, the coffee with its gill-and-a-half of cherry liqueur, and the ever-so-tiny slice of Demel’s infamously good Nusstorte.

  Coffee seemed the appropriate metaphor with which to start. The first coffeehouse had opened in Vienna in 1685, two years after the Ottoman armies had failed in their attempt to capture and sack the city. It has long been an element of Viennese folklore that among the extraordinary bounties left behind by the fleeing armies,* there were sacks of coffee beans, from which a local pleasure industry was promptly born. Everywhere today there are posters for one particular brand, Julius Meinl: the trademark is a young lad, wearing an absurdly elongated fez, and the company says it opened its first coffee shop on the very spot where the sacks of Turkish bounty were discovered. Moreover, the crescent-shaped pastry, the croissant, which in Vienna is known as the Kipferl, was created, all schoolchildren learn, by a long-forgotten Viennese Hausfrau, in celebration of the defeat of the would-be invaders and the banishing of their crescent flags. The connection between Turk and Austrian, between Istanbul and Vienna, is never far from the surface.

  Not entirely by chance I had with me that morning, for deliberately light Kaffeehaus reading, several very old copies of National Geographic that underlined that very point, since each one contained an essay concerning the Balkans. In one of them, the February 1921 issue, there was a lengthy piece by one George Higgins Moses, a now-long-forgotten U.S. senator from New Hampshire and an American minister to—when it was an independent state—the Kingdom of Montenegro. It was all very dated, a pompous and orotund essay titled The Whirlpool of the Balkans. But it did have some rather good lines, lines that were amply relevant to what was happening a thousand miles to the south of where we sat. The ones I thought most appropriate came in a paragraph toward the essay’s end, and I pointed them out to Rose:

  It is at Constantinople that the problems of the Near East have always centered in their acutest form. There, where teeming thousands throng the Bridge of Galata; where twenty races meet and clash with differences of blood and faith never yet cloaked beneath even a pretense of friendliness; where fanaticism and intrigue play constantly beneath the surface of oriental phlegmatism and sporadically break forth in eddies of barbaric reaction; where all the Great Powers of Europe have for generations practiced the art of a devious diplomacy—there, I say, has always been found the real storm-center of the danger zone of Europe. There it is that the currents which cause the whirlpool of the Balkans have both their origin and their end. This Imperial city, for nearly two thousand years a seat of power, still clutches at the key…

  Oh, the pleasure—to sit in a Viennese Kaffeehaus and to read of Constantinople! Once they read and thought of little else. Even these days the Viennese still cast an occasional backward glance at Turkey, to see what it’s up to, to see if it is still roiling the waters. Considering how close they came to being subjugated by the Ottomans, the Viennese have good cause to do so—though less these days than once.

  In 1921, when Senator Moses was writing, a sultan was still on the throne in the newly built palace on the Bosporus, the Dolmabahce Serai, and there was some modestly forlorn hope among political innocents like the senator—and the vaguest of fears among the more sensitive Austrians—that the Ottoman Empire, Sick Man of Europe though it may have been, might yet contrive to carry on.

  It was not to be, of course. For a hundred years or more the cynical leaders of the Great Powers, East and West—the Bismarcks, Wellingtons, Castlereaghs, Metternichs—had all endeavored to keep the old tottering empire alive—for fear that it might be replaced by something far, far worse. But by the twenties the fate of the Porte—the Sublime Porte, as the empire was generally known (named for a gate into the vizier’s offices)—had already been firmly sealed. At the end of World War I, Constantinople was a city under foreign occupation; only a few years before it had suffered the indignity of being occupied by the Bulgarians, who went so far as to temporarily depose the sultan.

  The sultan at the time of the senator’s essay, Mehmet VI, had but a year to live and reign, and his own successor, a cousin, though he had a further two years in the palace, was reduced by international agreement from sultan to the mere status of caliph. He eventually abdicated from that lowly post as well, going away by Orient Express to Paris. And then Kemal Atatürk came and finished off the Ottomans once and for all, made Turkey into a modern secular state, turned Topkapi and Dolmabahce into museums and Hagia Sofia into a third, and renamed the city “Istanbul.” With a wave of a republican wand, one more of the earth’s proud empires suddenly faded away, and all that was Ottoman was washed up and done with. Such threat as the Viennese might have imagined was gone for all time.

  Except that even at the empire’s very end, and for a long, long while after, there was a good deal of truth to the senator’s words—that Constantinople was “where the currents that cause the whirlpool…have their origin and their end.” Flashes of the Ottomans’ refulgent but meretricious presence still haunt the Balkans today, more than a century after the pashas and the beys were forced out of the region, and seventy years after they were forced to vanish altogether. There were stories aplenty in the Austrian papers that morning to illustrate the point—stories from refugees who were by now fanning across Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro, recounting the terrible things that had befallen them and their families.

  The happenings—some too dreadful to believe, stories of women being raped and h
urled down wells, of men eviscerated, of children butchered on bayonets—were to no small extent a legacy of the old Ottoman times. The Kosovo Serbs, Orthodox Christian almost to a man and woman, had chosen to pit themselves so savagely against Albanians, seeing them as descendants of people who had been converted to Islam by “the Turk,” as the Serbs always insultingly referred to the Ottoman invaders.

  There are students of the Near East today—scholars who still dabble in “the Eastern Question,” as it once was called—who will airily remark that “ancient ethnic hatreds” have precious little to do with today’s struggles in the Balkans. They argue, persuasively and knowingly, that what is happening in the region now has much more to do with struggles for territory, with economic disputes between landlord and tenant, with the cynical manipulations of contemporary politics and the Machiavellian involvements of outside powers. And they are probably technically right in saying so. But ask a Serbian Christian—as I was to do more than once in the ensuing weeks—just why is it that he, like the man in the gas station in Pec, loathes his Albanian neighbors so. Why he loathes them enough to rape Albanian women and toss them down wells. Or to eviscerate Albanians, or flay them and leave them skinless and drying in the sun.

  Ask him, and he will be sure to say, in one of his breathless sentences of explanation, that he hates them deepest down of all because they are Turks, Muslims, Asians, godless fiends who have no business being in Europe in the first place.

  Serbs like to remind us even today that the Battle of Kosovo Polje, back in 1389, had been a desperate attempt by Christian Europeans like themselves to halt the onrushing armies of the Asian Turk. They failed, but the nobility of their attempt goes some way to explain why Kosovo is so important in the Serbian mind. They remain bitter—or some of their more vicious leaders do—that so little in the Balkan history that then followed, or in the human geography it created—the cities, the buildings, the bridges, educational systems, houses of worship, systems of bureaucracy—managed to escape the influence, sometimes benign but more often malign, of those majestically corrupt Ottomans.

  At the height of its powers the Ottoman Empire extended from the Caspian Sea almost to the gates of Vienna. Its power and influence ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of war and sultanly whim, but for more than five hundred years, from before the Battle of Kosovo until well after the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the Ottomans presided over vast tracts of territory—and, as the sultans liked to put it, seventy-two and a half races*—with magnificent and perfumed equanimity.

  Ottoman dominion over the Balkans had actually been in place a full sixty years before 1453, the year when Mehmet the Conqueror overran Constantinople and, standing his horse on a pile of broken bodies, had formally turned the Hagia Sofia from the Byzantine Cathedral of Divine Wisdom† into his empire’s central mosque. But once the city had been successfully wrested away from the Greeks, the new rulers of so much of the Balkans and the Lower Danube Valley—and much else besides—always looked back east to the Topkapi Serai and the Sublime Porte as the spiritual and temporal centers of their authority. The Ottomans were the center of the whirlpool, and Constantinople was where the whirlpool gained its power.

  And from 1453 onward it was from Topkapi that the orders went out for the steady expansion of the sultan’s domains. By 1521 the crescent battle flags had reached as far north as Belgrade and Bucharest, and as far south as Alexandria and Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Beirut. A century later the territories ruled by beys and beylerbeis and pashas had expanded outward in all directions, like the ripples on a pond, to include the cities of Baghdad and Benghazi. By then the shores of the Black Sea were entirely Ottoman-run. Rome was the sultans’ early primary goal—the so-called Red Apple of Ottoman desire.

  A red apple—an odd choice for the symbol of imperial hopes and dreams. It had a long history: It went back even to before the attack of 1453, when the apple was said to be the orb held in the right hand of the statue of Justinian that stood in front of the Hagia Sofia—a symbol, in other words, of Constantinople itself. Then, once the Ottomans had won that city and gathered Hagia Sofia and the ancient statue (which was later torn down) into their territory, so a new apple had to be found—and Süleyman I the Magnificent, the greatest Ottoman sultan of them all, decreed that it should be Rome.

  “To Rome! To Rome!” was said to be a constant cry in Süleyman’s court. He had made one vain attempt on the city in 1529, trying to besiege Vienna on the way. But he failed after a mere eighteen days. Like Napoleon in Moscow, he was defeated at least in part by the unfamiliar and atrocious winter weather.

  It was a century and a half later, under the Sultan Mehmet IV, that the cry was for a new red apple—the city of Vienna itself, the seat of the Hapsburgs’ Holy Roman Empire. Once captured, it would be a bridgehead to the soft underbelly of Central Europe. This time the Turks were so numerous, their armies so well organized, and their self-confidence so unparalleled that they imagined it could be done. In the summer of 1683 their invading army reached the southern gates of the great city and prepared to lay siege. The city cathedral and the Hofburg were squarely in the sights of the Ottoman harquebuses and within the range of their siege mortars.

  In any event, it was to be a close-run thing. Had the Turks prepared a little more certainly and fought a little more aggressively, Vienna might well have gone the way of Belgrade and Budapest, Sofia and Sarajevo, Thessaloníki, Athens, Alexandria, and Cairo, and become a place of souks and mosques and dreamy Levantine administrators. But the city escaped capture, and the only memorials to just how close it came to surrender and having to endure the jeweled Ottoman heel are the croissant (baker-heroes working deep in the Viennese basements supposedly heard the Ottoman tunnelers laying mines), and places like Demel here, which owes its existence to the finding of those Turkish coffee beans. Which is why stuffy old Senator Moses made more than worthwhile reading that April day, among the ladies who lunched within the salon’s walls of ancient but reassuring mirrors.

  Most of the ladies who were lunching alone seemed to be reading local popular magazines like Profil and serious local newspapers like Die Presse, papers with front pages—this was April, and the bombing campaign was still only a few weeks old—covered with images of war and carnage from a thousand miles away. There were black headlines about the questionable actions of NATO and the sturdy defiance of the tyrants in Belgrade. Vienna is a prosperous city, and the Viennese can, if they care to, project an aloof and comfortable air. But those I talked to in the coffee shop that day seemed very well aware what was going on—and aware, too, of the extraordinary role that their city and their former Hapsburg rulers, as well as the sultans who nearly fell upon them, had played in bringing about this particular aspect of modern European history.

  Each nodded assuredly when I asked if there was a connection to be made between what was happening in Kosovo today and what had happened in Vienna three hundred years before. “Of course, of course,” one old lady said. “There can be no doubt.

  “Not for nothing had Metternich—oh, my, was it Mr. Metternich?” she asked the waitress, who shook her head “—said that the Balkans began at the Ringstrasse. Or was it Asia that begins at the Ring? Or the Orient? I can’t quite remember.”

  She was a venerable and genteel lady, and she looked briefly stymied. “But anyway, it is so true what they say—that we are on the edge of things just here. Poised between East and West. Just look at our eagle—the head that points both ways, indeed! And then, we were very nearly over the edge, you know, in 1683. We all know that from school. Like the story of the Kipferl. We all know that. We remember the Turks every day. The posters in the stores, and the bus stops. And then again things were bad for us in 1908, when we annexed Bosnia. Remember that? And once more in 1914, of course, when that Serb shot our archduke, in Sarajevo. And now here we are again today. All of it, everything going on down there, has something to do with the Viennese and the Ottomans. Or rather the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans. That’s
why this is, for us, so very interesting.” And she smiled proudly at her eloquence, and puffed out her chest and looked most importantly Viennese as she asked the waitress for her bill.

  So the Ottomans very nearly won the city in 1683—but they didn’t, and that is what brings a satisfied smile to the lips of most Viennese. One grisly and rarely seen trophy symbolizes the fact that they didn’t, and that the Viennese triumphed during that long hot summer three centuries ago. I had come to Vienna to try and see it. It was the severed head of the grand vizier of the court of the Sultan Mehmet IV, a greedy, violent, and xenophobic Turk with a fire-damaged face named Kara Mustafa Pasha.

  His was the siege—a siege that had all taken place so very close to here. It had begun in the middle of July, in a 1683 when elsewhere William Penn was innocently settling Pennsylvania and Newton was gently explaining his new theory that linked the running of tides to the phases of the moon. Kara Mustafa’s first cannonades—one of which hit the spires of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the ball remaining there to this day—came on either the fourteenth or the fifteenth, and to the terrified Viennese within the fortifications, it looked as though all was lost.

  The Ottoman armies were camped all around the city, below the great walls and the moat that, two centuries later, were torn down and filled in, respectively, to make today’s magnificently noble beltway, the Ringstrasse. The invading force was said by some to comprise about one hundred thousand men, most of them massed just outside the southern gates of the city, immediately beneath the towers of the Hofburg. So impressive was their encampment, and so huge, that Viennese remarked that it looked like another city, well able to rival Vienna itself—the Vienna that had taken a millennium to mature was almost eclipsed by a tent city that had sprung up in two days. (The remainder of the two hundred thousand Turks who had marched up from the Balkans were in reserve or engaged, with Tartars who had come up to join them from Crimea, in other actions in nearby towns.)