The yalis of Constantinople, for many still stand down by the sea near the Dolmabahce Palace and by the hotel that was once the Ciragan, offer some remembrance of what was once called “the Ottoman way.” Their setting, for a start, was magnificent. The light down by the strait was always so intense, the water of the seaway was so vividly blue, the wooden walls of the yalis were so high, and the houses and gardens within so magnificent and so lush—everything on the coast spoke of luxury and indolence, wealth and disdain. There were marble cascades and fountains and highly colored oil paintings; there were kiosks and cupolas; lattices of carved marble, jewels, and fragrant olive-wood; and jungles of roses, jasmine, and honeysuckle.
This was where the sultans’ obsession with tulips began. More than eight hundred varieties were listed in an Ottoman flower book, and one grand vizier who bred the flowers created forty-four new varieties. This is where the house cooks made dishes of eccentric specificity—stuffed fish in which not single lesion could appear on even a single scale, and confections that used only the left legs of animals, the sultanly chefs believing that since the animals invariably favored use of the right, these limbs would prove indelicately tougher, the left ones tenderer.
On the terrace of a yali you could sit and watch the boats go by, or the young giggling children diving endlessly into the cool and deep waters, and while doing so you could sip tamarind juice, or dip your fingers in grape treacle, and one tale had it that you could order a particular red jam containing, along with the rose petals and Circassian strawberries and cherries from Giresun,* tiny amounts of finely crushed rubies.
It is in such a wooden house, on the fashionable spur of Yenikoy, that Dr. Lucius now has his office, and from where he can ruminate on past events, if he cares to, and in an atmosphere of great imagined charm. The mansion, white and cool and sprawling in a broad seaside meadow, was built for an Armenian banker and then handed in 1884 as a personal gift to the old boiled-beef eater, Franz Josef, by the Sultan Abdülhamd II. (It cannot be demolished: The few wooden yali left in today’s Istanbul are preserved by government fiat, and can only be moved, never torn down.)
When I first met Dr. Lucius I was struck by the odd symmetry of the occasion: It was droll, I thought, that at the end of the journey I would be meeting an Austrian with tweeds and spectacles and a dryly sardonic academic manner and who was in interests and demeanor just like Dr. Düriegl, the director of the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, where I had begun this journey. And like Dr. Düriegl, he too was fascinated by the tale of Kara Mustafa Pasha, the grand vizier at the time of Sultan Mehmet IV. When I mentioned the name he drew in a rapid breath. “Ah, yes—that difficult old devil!”
The diplomatic fuss over the remains of Kara Mustafa continues. The head is in Vienna, the body in a village called Merzifon, northeast of Ankara, close to the southern shore of the Black Sea. Dr. Lucius had only that morning been helping to organize a symposium, due to be staged in Merzifon itself, on the life and times of Kara Mustafa, and he was helping to arrange for Austrian speakers to come and talk about the strategy behind the unhappy siege. No doubt, he said, given the passions felt by so many Turks, the incoming Austrian academics would have a trying time. No doubt there would once again be pleas, demands, perhaps even diplomatic insistence, that the head be sent back, to be buried next to the body to which it belonged. (Or was thought to belong. When I suggested DNA testing of the two sets of remains, to see if a match was likely, all the scholars involved in the debate showed themselves to be happily detached from reality by confessing they had never even considered the idea. “It would certainly end all the confusion,” said one of them, chortling.)
But there were many happier and less controversial links between Vienna and Istanbul, Dr. Lucius added. The first medical school in Constantinople had been opened by an Austrian. A Viennese doctor—a man named Hammerschmidt, who had his name changed to Abdullah Bey—had inaugurated the Turkish Red Crescent. The greatest of all the many histories of the Ottomans is that known familiarly as The Hammer—written by the Austrian imperial embassy’s late-eighteenth-century dragoman Josef von Hammer-Purgstall, who dressed in Ottoman style and toured for years through every corner of the Empire. In more modern times Austrian foresters helped set up the Turkish reforestation schemes; Austrian pharmacists helped establish the chemical industry; Austrian generals trained the modern Turkish army; Austrian architects designed the Turkish parliament in Ankara, as well as several of the capital’s ministries and the current President’s house; and the first monument erected in the memory of the maker of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, was sculpted in 1926, by an Austrian.
“Is that enough, perhaps?” asked Dr. Lucius, “to show how much better matters are today, than when Kara Mustafa was just outside the Ringstrasse?”
And what other Balkan harmonies might there be, I wondered, here beside the Golden Horn? I knew from Anja, the young woman with whom we had spent time back in Sarajevo, that there was a sizable Serbian community in Istanbul. Most of them were Muslims from the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, that fingerlike extension of Ottoman rule that intruded between southwestern Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro. They huddle close together in the old part of the city, off the Divan Yolu, close to the sprawling covered market. There are Sanjak communities in Izmir and Erzerum, all tucked away in the inner cities, all doing deals, involved at the shadier end of the economic spectrum. In Istanbul they have gathered in the shadow of a small hotel, the Balkan, which is always full of newcomers, usually migrants who have wearied of the fighting or the troubles they all foresee.
It was easy to find Anja’s old boyfriend, Daut. Everyone from the Sanjak in Istanbul seems to know everyone else. There is a hugger-mugger camaraderie among the traders and businessmen and otherwise amiable rogues who lurk in the tiny stalls and basement rooms clustered around the hotel. Daut was at the family jewelry shop; he had a dozen thin gold chains suspended from the fingers of one hand and a bottle of beer in the other hand, and he was idly watching a soccer match on television. He jumped with delight at his girlfriend’s name, and within minutes became positively sentimental about Sarajevo. He had been there for much of the war, dealing, making money, involved in goodness knows what.
And when we told him we had been in Kosovo, he called all his friends from the street, and we soon had an excited audience, eager for news of the bombing and of the situation that day. They knew that NATO had bombed towns in Novi Pazar; I told them that I only wished we had been able to get there—but technically the Sanjak was Serbia still, and the Yugoslav authorities had cracked down hard and wouldn’t let anyone in.
“This is why we’re here,” said Daut, and his friends nodded approvingly. “There’s no freedom in the Sanjak—the VJ and the MUP are giving us trouble all the time. The difference is—we’re better dealers, better traders than the Kosovo Albanians, or the Bosniaks. The Serbs need us—we make their system work.”
Daut did not suppose there would be trouble in the Sanjak—he did not expect the Belgrade government to order a program of repression of the Muslims there, as they had, to their cost, in Kosovo. “The next trouble won’t be in the Sanjak—it will be in Montenegro, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. “And as we and Montenegro have a common border—I guess we could feel the effects. But Milosevic, or whoever succeeds him there, is going to crack a few heads in Montenegro. You mark my words. There’ll be a lot more of us here in Turkey before this business is done with.”
They liked the Turks, and the cosmopolitan character of a city which has been a crossroads for all of its existence. Daut spoke a formidable array of languages—Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Polish, Italian, English—and of course Serbian. He could get along perfectly well and might stay for years.
“But of course what we all really want to do is to go home. We have so much in common with the Serbs, apart from our religion of course—we get on with them. And the Serbs need us—we are their Jews, their Chinese. We’re nothing for the Serbs to feel afraid
of. We’ll make money, they’ll make money, everyone will get along.
“But for now—it is too dangerous. And besides, business is too slow. We can make more money down here. It’s just that I—we, all of us—miss the old place. I telephone, when the circuits are working, and I hear their voices, and I feel so sad. The people of the Sanjak are the best there are. We sing, we dance, we drink. We are the very heart of the Balkan people. So what are we doing in Turkey?”
A small indication of Daut’s attitude—and the attitude of the Sanjak people more generally—came later in the evening. We had gone to a bar, to hear a gusla player singing sentimental songs that made the Sanjak boys look soulful, homesick. The television was burbling away in the corner, when pictures came on the screen of Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader who was on trial on a tiny prison-island in the Sea of Marmara. Daut called for quiet and had the volume turned up. Ocalan had been found guilty, the announcer said. He would be sentenced in two weeks’ time.
Daut cheered loudly. “That bastard, Ocalan. Of course he’s guilty. Compared with him, Milosevic is an angel. An angel. I tell you, Ocalan has killed fifty thousand people, at the very least. He’s guilty all right—and he should hang for it. And people should know that, compared with him, Milosevic is really not all that bad. There are worse men in the world. And far worse people than the Serbs.”
I had one final mission in Istanbul, a task that also involved looking back along this journey, toward the Balkans. Specifically I had one question left—about the fate of poor old Montenegro, where there had been the argument—one that will be bound to assume greater importance if, as the Sanjak boys were warning, there is trouble brewing—between the two old Orthodox patriarchs. Which of the pair, I had been wondering ever since, was in the right?
Which of the churches of Montenegro deserved the loyalty of the people? Was it the Serbian Orthodox Church, which from its ancient monastery and been offering spiritual leadership for centuries, and most decidedly since the end of the Montenegrin royal family after the end of the Great War? Or should the people now rightly turn, as good and patriotic Montenegrins, to this new Montenegrin Church, which was being run by the Metropolitan Mihailo from its small suburban house on the outskirts of that tiny capital in the mountains, Cetinje? It would be in Istanbul, I suspected, that I would be able to find the answer.
Because Istanbul was far more than what it appeared to be today—this bustling, polyglot, polytheistic crossroads city that stands on the cusps of both Europe and Asia and is eagerly planning a future for itself as a world capital enjoying the benefits of both the continents on which it lies. And it was much more than its predecessor Constantinople had been, too—far more than the exotic headquarters for the mighty but always dreamily expiring empire of the Ottomans. It had long also been Byzantium—ever since the schism that had split the Roman church in two it had been the spiritual center of the Orthodox Church.
For a thousand years, from the three hundreds until the Ottomans stormed the Hagia Sofia church in 1453, Byzantium had been the anchor to a Christian empire that stretched from Ravenna in the west to Mesopotamia in the east, from the Sava River in the north to Tripolitania in North Africa. The emperors ruled in Greek, as Christians; they employed Roman law and the basked in and spread the best of Hellenistic culture. The nearly ninety Byzantine emperors, from Zeno to Constantine XI, at their best ran a tolerant, prosperous, and enlightened empire. The most powerful architect of its fortunes, the great Emperor Justinian, who ruled for thirty-eight years in the sixth century, was born near what is now the great railway-junction city of Nis, in Yugoslavia. When NATO planes were bombing Nis, their pilots likely thought they were exerting enormous power over the land. Probably most were unaware that one of the very greatest forces ever to have shaped Balkan history came from directly below, deep within their target zone.
The rules of the Orthodox Church, worldwide, give all of the member churches—the Russians, the Greeks, the Serbs, the Cypriots—total autonomy and authority. Except in one small sense, a somewhat indistinct sense of external authority that hovers somewhere between sentiment and tradition, and that is vested in a figure known as the ecumenical patriarch, and who always lives in Istanbul. (Or Constantinople, as his business card defiantly proclaims.)
The patriarch—officially addressed as “Your Beatitude”—is always drawn from Istanbul’s dwindling Greek community and is regarded officially by the government as simply the Greek patriarch. To the church worldwide, however, he is its still center—a symbol, not of authority, but of, let us say, Orthodox good manners. He will raise an eyebrow or look askance—and a whole canon of behavior in a distant patriarchate will subtly change. He is not there to order or to be obeyed: He is there to counsel, and to warn.
The current ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew, was appointed in 1991, and like his predecessors for two thousand years, lives in the district of old Istanbul called the Fener, from the word Phanar, the Greek word for the lighthouse that once stood there to warn of a shoal in the Golden Horn. His achdeacon, a supreme authority on ecclesiastical questions, is an American named Peter Anton from San Antonio, Texas, and whose formal priestly name is Archdeacon Tarasios. He is a learned, fussy, bustling man, who when he had our audience was constantly on the telephone, handing out books and press releases and his E-mail address, all the time shooing in and out of his study supplicants and mendicants and aspirant priests, and those new members of the church who wished to be blessed by a brief audience with the patriarch himself.
His papers and utterances contain all manner of words utterly unfamiliar to the layman, suggesting Orthodoxy to be a most complicated faith: I saw on his desk, or noted him to have used the words autocephalous, vicariate, exarch, pharmakolytria, eparchial, patristic, and stauropegial. Not surprisingly, given such a vocabulary, it was difficult to pin him down to so simple a matter as whether the Montenegrin Church had the proper authority, or whether the people of Cetinje and Podgorica and Kotor should regard the priests of the Serbian Church as their spiritual leaders
But eventually he did offer an answer, though he did not wish to be quoted formally as saying anything at all. In ecclesiastical matters, it appeared, the Office of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople holds the line. It has no direct power over the churches, except for a very small number of the less well known branches. But in matters of doctrine and discipline and one might say, taste, the patriarch attempts to exert what influence he can, and in a subtle, gentle manner. It might have been recently noticed, for instance, that the patriarch of Serbia made a sermon in Belgrade that was critical of Mr. Milosevic? Well, it was no secret that Bartholomew had spoken with him some while before—privately, quietly, and about what was not known. But a conversation had been held. A statement had been made. An American might say simply: Do the math.
In the specific matter of Montenegro, the matter was abundantly clear. The new Montenegrin Church was a wholly spurious invention. The man who calls himself Father Mihailo had held a post in Rome and was no longer doing so. It was not within the authority of the ecumenical patriarch to say why. But the properly constituted ecclesiastical authority in Montenegro is the Serbian Orthodox Church—and while that may not always be the case, it is very much the case now. The new one was merely spurious.
So that was it. The boys from the Sanjak had prophesied trouble in Montenegro. The people whom we had encountered while we were there had all warned of trouble in Montenegro. And now here was yet another reason, one might suppose, for why in time some Montenegrin people at least might have cause to feel slighted, or dismayed, or angry.
I felt gloomily apprehensive as we left the dusty confines of the Fener, with the chanting of monks echoing faintly from an upstairs room. It was remarkable, I thought, that here in old Istanbul, even now, there was a residual power and a relict influence that could manage still to stir the Balkan pot, to fan the Balkan flames, and to be the ultimate cause of distant havoc yet to come, in the lands that these peop
le, Byzantine and Ottomans both, had each directed for so long.
We went down to Sultanahmet for our last dinner and sat outside at the Rumeli Café, drinking good Turkish beer and Anatolian red wine, and eating lamb and eggplant and almond lokum and coffee. We argued gently, as to whether what we had seen in the hundreds of miles that lay behind us had been anyone’s fault—whether any one person, or place, or cultural or religious influence, could have been said to have led directly to the kind of troubles that we had seen and read about today and yesterday and for so very long before. Had it been the Turks, for instance—had it been their brutality, their corruption, the savage complications of their administrative formulae—that left such a residue of bitterness and hatred that only vengeance could assuage.
I was still haunted by George Higgins Moses, and the words in that old copy I had of a once-wise magazine. “It is at Constantinople,” he wrote, and it seems well worth repeating,
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.
So could we perhaps agree with the old Serb proverb: “Grass never grows where the Turkish hoof has trod”? Did those Serbs who butchered Albanians in the weeks and months before ever look into their victims’ eyes and say to themselves, This, you know—this is for the Turks?
The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans Page 21