Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  During the Crimean War, Ludwika became the most important political figure of the Polish emigration in Turkey. Among other functions, she acted as liaison officer between the commanders of the Polish forces training in their base at Burgas, on the Black Sea coast, and political visitors from Paris concerned with how to use the 'Ottoman Cossacks' as a bargaining counter to influence the Allied war aims. This woman — whose tomb so typically describes her as a man's daughter, a man's niece and a man's wife — spent much of her life giving men orders and seeing that they carried them out. In return they charged her with 'bossiness', which she ignored, and complained that she was 'hard', which she was not.

  Adam Mickiewicz arrived in the autumn of 18 5 5, on the steamer Mont Thabor from Marseille. His cover-story was a research trip to study education in the Balkans, but he paid little attention to Ottoman schooling. He felt happy, for the first time in years. The war in Crimea seemed to be going well, and he was back in the Islamic world again for the first time since his journey to Crimea. Going ashore at Smyrna on the way, he did not bother with the conventional sights. 'I found something else worthy of my attention,' he wrote in a letter. 'I saw mounds of dung and garbage, bits of bone and crockery, the sole of an old slipper, some loose feathers. That really appealed to me. I stood there staring for a long time; it was what one used to see in front of a Polish country inn.'

  He liked living hard. He was genuinely short of money in Istanbul, but he may also have wanted to show himself that at fifty-seven he could still exist like a nomad, a soldier or a student. In the Lazarist monastery, Mickiewicz slept under his greatcoat and used his trunk as table and bookcase. He had brought his favourite stick, a 'pilgrim staff, and he followed his own favourite morning routine: a glass of Turkish coffee topped with thick cream and laced with cognac, followed by vigorous pipe-smoking. Up at Burgas, he was happy too. Back in 1848, at another moment when the iron landscape of European autocracy seemed to be falling apart, he had raised his own Polish legion in Rome and marched with it through Milan to challenge the might of the Habsburg Empire. Now, in the company of Sadyk Pasha, Ludwika's husband, he slept under canvas again and rode about watching the Polish forces, the Ottoman Cossacks, at their training. He went hunting in the hills, and listened to soldiers' songs round the camp-fire.

  The optimism did not last long. Mickiewicz fell out with Sadyk. A political crisis was building up between Burgas and Paris; Sadyk wanted supreme command of an independent Polish force under the sultan, while Czartoryski preferred a British plan for dividing up the Poles between several foreign commands and accused Sadyk of hankering after dictatorship. But this did not bother Mickiewicz. Sadyk was the sort of impulsive eastern Pole he liked, and he shared his instinct for a free Polish army fighting as a recognised, distinct member of the anti-Russian coalition. His difficulty with Sadyk was about the Jews.

  Mickiewicz had travelled a long intellectual journey in his reflections about Jewish destiny. There is a possibility that his own mother came from a 'Frankist' family, from the eighteenth-century Ukrainian sect led by the magnificent charlatan Jakub Frank (Jankiel Lejbowicz) which defected from Judaism and sought conversion to the Catholic faith. His wife Celina was of Frankist descent, and Mickiewicz's sense of a providential relationship between the two nations, Poles and Jews, became steadily stronger as he grew older. The cause of 'Israel, our elder brother' and the cause of Polish independence could not, he decided, be separately solved.

  He always believed in full equality and civil rights for Jews. But for a long time, especially during the years when his mind was dominated by the mystic Towiariski (a much dingier charlatan than Frank), he assumed that the self-realisation of Jewry would be through conversion to Christianity. Later, he was able to shake off this notion of convergence, and look forward to a free Poland in which Jews and Poles would help one another to follow parallel destinies. 'Without the emancipation of the Jews, and the development of their spirit, Poland cannot rise. Should she rise without the emancipation of the Jews, which I do not believe, she certainly will not be able to maintain herself.

  When he reached the camp at Burgas, he found that the troops included hundreds of Polish, Ukrainian and Russian Jews. As far away as Plymouth, where prisoners of war were kept in the Mill Bay gaol, Polish emissaries had already been recruiting anti-tsarist Jews to serve against Russia. Now Mickiewicz conceived a new vision. He would form the Jews into a separate legion within the Ottoman Cossack division: the 'Hussars of Israel'.

  This plan took up the remaining weeks of the poet's life. The Polish exiles had long ago decided that the first step to the liberation of their country — the token to the oppressed millions at home that a free Poland already lived and fought - was the establishment of a Polish army abroad: the 'legionary idea'. Mickiewicz now applied this thought to the Jews. The Hussars of Israel would be a Jewish legion. His friend Armand Levy, an assimilated French Jew who had travelled with him to Turkey, told Turkish officials that 'we want to elevate ourselves as a race, and we believe that the best means ... is the submission of proof that we are not only as intelligent but also as brave as the others'.

  The creation of the Hussars and their victories in battle would not only announce to the world that the Jewish nation had broken away from the ancient Gentile caricature of egotism and servility; it would also electrify and transform the Jewish masses throughout the Russian Empire. And, as Mickiewicz put it, the Christian peasantry would follow the Jewish example. 'We shall spread like lava with our continually growing legion, from synagogue to synagogue, village to village, into the very depths of Poland and Lithuania.'

  For a time, the Hussars of Israel seemed to be possible. Sadyk Pasha agreed to a proposal from Mickiewicz that a synagogue should be opened in the camp, and that Jewish soldiers should have Saturdays off during training. Lieutenant Michal Horenstein designed a fine uniform for the Hussars and wore it about Burgas, to the delight of Mickiewicz. But, behind the poet's back, Sadyk grew satirical. He had no doubts about the fighting qualities of Jewish troops; at the capture of Bucharest the year before, Jewish soldiers had done well and later — after the death of Mickiewicz — they fought bravely under his command outside Sevastopol. He also calculated that the project would help to raise money for the Polish cause from the Jewish financial world, and he wrote letters and reports criticising 'the ridiculous yet factually existing prejudice against a Jewish army'. But he could foresee what Turkish objections would arise, above all the fear that a Jewish legion might turn its energies away from Russia and towards Palestine, still an Ottoman province. And Sadylc himself was not free of racial and religious prejudice.

  In the end, they quarrelled. Sadyk told Mickiewicz that 'an army with separate Jewish and Ukrainian units under the leadership of a Polish nobleman is unthinkable. It would be a freak.' Mickiewicz went angrily back to Istanbul and his dank room in Pera at the end of October 1855, and tried to revive the Hussars of Israel at meetings with Turkish officials, Jewish dignitaries and foreign diplomats. He continued to see Ludwika but even she, in spite of all her affection for him, found it hard to take his plans seriously. Unwisely, she read to him a letter from her husband at Burgas in which he referred casually to 'scurvy Jews'. The poet was appalled. After his death, she wrote to Sadyk: 'Perhaps Mickiewicz's origin, or that of his family or wife, was [Jewish], for where did such love for Israel come from? I never thought about it until I read him your letter and came to the "scurvy Jew" bit; how he trembled, how excited he was! I don't know whether it is possible to love strange things so much, but perhaps he was in love with his own idea, wishes and thoughts.'

  In Istanbul, it began to rain. Among the sick and wounded of the Allied armies, who crowded the streets or lay in hospital, cholera broke out. On the Asian side of the Bosporus, Florence Nightingale struggled to hold back the epidemic in the wards at Scutari. On the European side, one morning in late November, Adam Mickiewicz felt suddenly sick and giddy. He drank coffee and smoked a pipe, and felt a little bet
ter. Horenstein and a friend came to see him, in their sleek grey Hussars of Israel tunics, and talked about the war news and the gossip from Burgas. Then, when they had gone, the first violent stomach cramps began.

  He was dead by the following night. There was no effective treatment, and he and his friends knew it. Colonel Kuczyriski, a friend from Paris, called during the last evening and bent over his bed. Mickiewicz managed a smile, and began to say something: 'Kuczyiiski.. . the Ottoman Cossacks...' Then he lost consciousness. It was six, and growing dark. Just before nine, he died.

  The war went on. The Ottoman Cossacks, with Sadyk at their head, went off to Crimea and fought 'for your freedom and ours': the Jews served in their ranks, and nothing more was heard of the Hussars of Israel. Nothing more was heard about Polish independence either, once the war was over. When the Allies and Russia sat down in Paris to make peace the following year, they agreed to overlook the Polish question. That was the price already agreed for keeping Austria and Prussia, the two other partitioning powers, in the alliance against Russia. The French and the British, who had deliberately raised the hopes of the Poles, now abandoned them. The Russian ambassador at the Peace Conference reported with relief that the word 'Poland' had not been so much as mentioned.

  Seven years later, in January 1863, the last and most terrible of the Polish nineteenth-century insurrections broke out. Men and women chanted the poems of Mickiewicz and Slowacki as they marched through the forests or lay waiting in the trenches, hoping that they would live up to the prophecies of 'the nation as Christ' or 'resurrection through sacrifice'. When the January Rising failed, most Europeans thought that the age of Romantic nationalism had closed for ever. The future must surely belong to great supranational blocks of power, to the empires.

  The corpse of Adam Mickiewicz was taken back to France by steamer, and buried in Paris. Many years later, in 1890, it was dug up again and brought to the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, where Mickiewicz was laid among the Polish kings. Then the world changed once more, in a quite unexpected direction. The First World War ended with the collapse of four empires: Ottoman, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanov. All along a line drawn between Galway and Georgia, all round the Black Sea and across the triangle between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Adriatic, the graves opened and the forgotten nations emerged to claim sovereign statehood. One of them was Poland. From Partition to Resurrection had taken 124 years.

  Ludwika stayed in her grave by the Black Sea, where the first and last passions of Adam Mickiewicz were enacted. The phrase 'in Polish soil' written on her tomb is not about politics or territory. It is about a sort of transubstantiation, held to take place wherever Polish blood falls or bones are buried - much what Rupert Brooke meant by the 'corner of a foreign field / Which is for ever England'. In the Sikorski Museum in London, there is an urn containing earth mixed with blood, taken by a Polish soldier from the slope at Monte Cassino on which his dead comrade lay. This substance is polska ziemia — Polish soil.

  Chapter Seven

  Home,

  A sort of honour, not a building site,

  Wherever we are, when, if we chose, we might

  Be somewhere else, but trust that we have chosen right.

  W. H. Auden, 'In Wartime' (1942)

  THE BUS JOURNEY from Ankara to Trabzon, which used to be Trebizond, takes thirteen hours. The road begins in the steppe of central Anatolia and then winds down through the forests and passes of the coastal mountains to the Black Sea. This is the route that Xenophon and his Ten Thousand took in 400 BC, on their march home from Persia. But where exactly they were when the soldiers saw the blue band on the horizon ahead of them, and cried out 'Thalassal The sea!', cannot be known.

  Some think that it was near the port of Ordu, about a hundred miles west of Trebizond, others that they filed down from the mountains a little further east. The point is that when the soldiers shouted 'ThalassaV, the local people understood them. They were Greeks too. Trebizond, which was their 'Trapezos', was only one of the chain of colony-cities which lined that shore, in touch with all the other Greek settlements ringing the Black Sea. They had been there for three hundred years already when Xenophon and the survivors of his army came out of the wilderness. The Pontic Greeks, as these settlers came to be called, remained on that coast and in its green, foggy valleys running up to the snowline for almost two and a half thousand more years. They were ruled by the Romans, then by the Byzantine emperors, then — briefly - by the Grand Comnenoi, emperors of Trebizond. After that, the Turks came. That too the Pontic Greeks survived, negotiating and

  conceding a little, converting to Islam a little. The end came only in 19x3, with the event known in diplomatic language as 'The Exchange' and in undiplomatic Greek as the Katastrofe.

  Greece, in a wild imperial venture supported by Britain, had invaded western Anatolia, hoping to make itself an Aegean 'great power' and to construct a 'greater Greece' out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. But the invasion ended not simply in Greece's defeat at the battle of Dumlupinar in 1922, but in a calamitous rout and slaughter which drove not only the Greek armies but much of the Greek civilian population of Anatolia into the sea. The Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, settled the frontiers of the new Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The universal caliphate — a sprawling, multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire - now imploded like a dead star, metamorphosing itself into a compact, homogenous modern state of Moslem religion and Turkish speech. At the same time, Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange minorities. Nearly half a million Moslems (many of whom were Greeks in all but religion) were forced to leave Greece, while more than a million Christians (some of whom were culturally Turks) were expelled from Turkey. Most of the Christians were Pontic Greeks, who abandoned their monasteries and farms, their town houses and banks and schools, and fled with what they could carry down to the docks.

  People on Turkish buses are either going home or leaving home. I never met anyone who admitted to travelling on business or on state duty. Before each passenger climbing into the Trabzon coach floated the picture of a house. For some, it was an urban apartment doorway, crowded with women and children weeping or waving farewell. For others, it was a red-roofed house above the Black Sea, an expectant house in which the family have finished preparations for the welcome and are telling each other to go to bed and not wait up. Everyone on the coach was a little tremulous, anxious to be consoled or distracted.

  A beautiful woman, tall and narrow-eyed as a Kazakh, had flown back from her job with an oil company in Japan to see her family in Giresun - the town which the Greeks named Kerasos and which gave its name to a fruit which the Romans found there and planted all over their world: the cherry. A well-wrapped family, with a married daughter in a heavy Islamic cowl, talked to each other in scathing Brooklyn English; they were heading home from New York to the port of Samsun. A peasant woman was helped by the other passengers to settle her handicapped daughter, paralysed and lolling, into a front seat; she arranged a white scarf about the girl's head and then, twisting her hands, made a speech about the family's misfortune. Beside me, a young woman studying media sciences in Holland talked to me about her mother waiting for her at Unye, about her experiences as a trainee in Dutch television. As night fell and a misshapen, waxing moon blazed over the bare hills, she told me that snow had fallen that day in the high Pontic Alps.

  This was a swift, strong Ulusoy bus, from the long-distance road fleet which binds the Turkish continent together. Every hour or so, the conductor came down the aisle with a glass carboy of cologne. Cupped hands were held out and filled; faces and necks were laved and massaged. The conversations fell away, and the passengers slept. On my other side, by the window, a bearded man remained silent. Once he turned to me, opening his black eyes wide, and said, 'I am a Turk!' He regarded me for a long moment, then turned back to the window.

  I half-woke at Samsun, and then again at Unye where the girl from Holland got off. Now the Black Sea was present, no more than an
oppressive darkness on one side of the highway. When I woke again, at first light, a shrill voice was shouting and wailing. At first I thought it belonged to an eighteen-month-old boy, being tossed up and down and comforted by his parents a few rows ahead of me. Then I realised it was coming from further forward, where the handicapped girl had been placed with her mother. The sound strengthened into a sort of chant, a loud, protesting crying. Some of the men had gathered round the seat from which the noise was coming. The crying was not from the girl, it seemed, but from her mother. Low voices muttered in Turkish around me, and I saw that two women sitting across the aisle from me were silently wiping away tears with their scarfs.

  Two men came down the aisle, carrying with great difficulty the handicapped child wrapped in a blanket from head to foot, and laid the bundle across one of the rear seat rows, near the door. I understood then that the girl was dead, that she must have died some time back in the darkness as the coach made its way down through the hills towards the sea. The mother came past and sat down by her daughter's body. Her cries became a rhythm, and then a song, a Pontic dirge of mourning in which the same musical phrase rose and fell in verse after verse.

  Ahead of us, to the east, a huge red glare was rising from behind the next cape as if the city of Trabzon were burning. The sea was visible now, still black, with viscous dark-blue gleams. As the sun rose, the bearded man next to me began to pray, sitting upright and moving his lips. When he was done, he made the Moslem gesture of reverence, passing his hands gently down his face as if awakening from a dream.