by Gina Perry
Tuğba the archivist, a slight woman with a mass of dark curls and large glasses who was clearly very proud of the museum, took me upstairs and showed me a small glass cabinet in the corner of a hallway. Tuğba’s English was rusty and my Turkish was nil, but I understood from her that this display was the result of the commemorative event for Sherif held back in 2013. On display inside were four of Sherif’s books, which looked measly in comparison to the dioramas celebrating the town’s other residents.
I told Tuğba I was looking for the street in Ödemiş that was named after Sherif, and she consulted a book and came back with a slip of paper in her hand, offering to call me a taxi to take me there.
On the street she handed the driver a piece of paper and gave him directions. He looked at the address, shot her questions, and then opened the door doubtfully. ‘He will take you,’ Tuğba said confidently.
But soon we were lost. The driver stopped at a shop to ask directions, then at a shoemaker’s stand, under a striped canvas awning on the footpath. Finally he stopped at what looked like a car park, where a sad-faced man got up from his desk and came out to inspect me through the window of the cab, then pointed across the street.
It was a long street, lined with low stone houses hidden behind high walls. The taxi driver stopped at a pink-washed wall with a blue door, the branches of an olive tree spilling down over it. He pointed at the house, then down at the paper Tuğba had given him. I walked to the corner, looking for the sign, but there was none. No wonder no one knew where the street was. Further along, the old houses petered out, and it widened into a quiet roadway that stretched away to the distant mountains.
It definitely wasn’t the same place that I’d seen in the photos of the opening ceremony. In the pictures, the mayor was lined up with a row of dignitaries at the entrance of a small and crowded street beside the blue-and-white sign bearing Sherif’s name. But it didn’t matter. The house in this unmarked road must have been his childhood home. Whether it was a language miscommunication, or perhaps because Tuğba knew that the street named in his honour was gone, as I later found, she had pointed me to this simple house, a fragment of Sherif’s past. I wandered up and down for a while, taking photos.
It seemed strange that the commemorative street had disappeared. But then I remembered the election of the new mayor, who was from Erdoğan’s AKP party. Was it a simple matter of a new incumbent in the mayoral office staking his claim? Or was it part of something larger, the obliteration of reminders of those who supported Kemalism and the founding of the secular Republic? It wasn’t until later that I learned this wasn’t the first time Sherif had been sidelined by the winds of politics in Turkey.
Perhaps there was no single event, no one moment where Muzafer Sherif’s childhood was snatched away from him. From the age of six he lived in an empire, and then a country, that was constantly at war: beginning with the Italo–Turkish War in Libya in 1911, to the Balkan Wars from 1912 to 1913, to World War I from 1914 to 1918, and then to the War of Independence, which lasted from 1919 to 1922.
As a typical child of the late Ottoman Empire, Muzafer grew up playing games, reading books, and listening to his mother’s stories of trickster Nasreddin Hodja. At school he learned how to read and write Arabic and to recite the Qur’an. But slowly, those wars that had until then seemed remote, just the mutterings of his father and uncles at the tea house, would have come into sharp focus and thrust themselves into his consciousness.
Across the Ottoman Empire, rising nationalisms were dissolving loyalty to the sultan, which had previously united the melting pot of different ethnic religious and cultural groups in Anatolia. Mistrust between Ottoman Greeks and Turks surged after Greece declared war on the Empire during the Balkan Wars, and after the Empire’s humiliating loss of the prized city of Salonica in 1912. Beginning in 1913, the Ottomans began the forcible expulsion of Greeks and, later, Armenians, who had lived in the area for generations and whose family history, language, memories, and loyalty were bound up in their town and neighbourhoods, but were now regarded as traitors. As part of a government push, they were driven out of their homes and businesses or rounded up, their properties looted, their churches destroyed. In the winter of 1916, when Muzafer was ten years old, the town crier, accompanied by a small boy beating a drum, made his way through the streets of Ödemiş in a flurry of snow, announcing the edict that began with an account of the subversion and treachery of the Armenians and ended with the news of their deportation. Five days later, amid terrible lamentations and wailing, 1,500 Armenian families and their possessions were loaded onto donkey and oxen carts. Under the escort of gendarmes, they were marched out of Muzafer’s home town.
But almost as soon as the familiar faces of neighbours, shopkeepers, and friends disappeared, a wave of strangers arrived to take their place. Anatolia was engulfed after the Balkans War, with almost half a million refugees arriving between 1913 and 1918.
From what I saw at the Ödemiş cultural museum, any reference to local Greeks and Armenians, who had been part of the area’s culture for centuries, had been edited out of the story of the town. In much the same way local Armenian churches have been converted into mosques, the museum told a story about the town that ignored uncomfortable truths.
In villages and towns across Anatolia, differences that had been submerged by generations of intermarriage, the practicalities of business relationships, and the interdependence of neighbours suddenly resurfaced. Friends and neighbours who had lived in the same area for generations now viewed one another through the prism of religion and politics.
History books describe these dramatic changes, and some memoirs by leading writers such as Halide Edib and Irfan Orga touch on them, but none can tell me specifically what villagers and townspeople in places like Bozdağ or Ödemiş thought of what was happening: if they supported the expulsions or if they felt outraged or ashamed. So we can only guess that people such as Muzafer and his family, who counted Greek and Armenians among their employees, shopkeepers, neighbours, and friends would have felt. They would probably have been torn between violent love for their country and hatred of traitors, and affection and fellow feeling for their community members. For some, patriotism won out every time. Others remained conflicted and troubled, and spent a lifetime trying to make sense of it. Many simply tried to forget.
For Ottoman children, this seismic shift in loyalties was reflected in school readers. In Muzafer’s first couple of years at school, before 1913, students learned an idealised version of the Ottoman Empire, built on unity, equality, and cooperation among people from a wide variety of ethnic and religious communities. At the same time, Turks were presented as superior for having established the Ottoman government, for having the longest history defending the Empire, and for being the largest and most powerful group in its borders:
These sacred lands, on which various ethnic groups and elements like the Turks, Arabs, Albanians, Bosnians, Kurds, Laz people, Georgians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Bulgarians live with a language and are unified under a common benefit are called homeland. The composition of these elements living under the same rule are called “nation” (millet). This homeland is Ottoman; our common nation is the Ottoman nation … love your homeland and nation much more than your life, and live proudly under the honorable Ottoman flag.
Instead of playing games, patriotic schoolchildren, like Muzafer and his brothers, were expected to practise military skills so as to prepare for adult military service. It was without question that they would engage in the defence of their homeland.
After 1913, Muzafer’s schoolbooks told a dramatically different story. The Empire had lost more than half of its territories in the Balkan Wars. Traumatised by these losses, the Young Turks, in their nation-building, organised history lessons in primary schools that emphasised a break with the past. Schoolbooks exhorted the new generation of nationalists to mourn the loss of the lands of the Empire, to protect its terri
tories, and to seek retaliation against those ethnic groups who had betrayed them. These texts did not censor or protect children from stories of brutality and trauma. Now many of the cultural and ethnic groups that had been encouraged to rally together under the Ottoman flag were traitors, as the passages made clear:
They behaved like worms inside us. They joined our foreign enemies. They took ¾ of our motherland and wounded our dear mother. They killed thousands of, hundred thousands of suckling babies, raped our women, and, these monsters even raped our little girls. Turkish child! Remember these enemies who were previously worms, and who transformed into snakes now. The blood of your grandfathers is shouting: “Turkish child! Take your revenge!” Do not ever forget the words Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian and those who want to behave like them!
Increasingly, with war, the battle for new territories, and rising nationalisms in both Greek and Turkey, the classification of Ottoman subjects according to race and religion gained new power. The ties that bound the multiethnic groups were unravelling. The question of which group you belonged to — Armenian, Greek, Turkish, Jewish, Christian, Muslim — was no longer straightforward. How did you identify yourself? Whose side were you on?
In 1914, when he was nine, Sherif’s school closed its doors — like so many during World War I. For his mother, Emine, keeping an eye on five children with no school to occupy them would have been a worry.
For Muzafer, no school would have meant freedom and a chance to explore. He must have been a cocky and adventurous boy. One day, he and a friend set out for Smyrna, 60 miles away; it was too far to walk so I imagine they caught an occasional ride on a donkey cart, following the railroad track for 60 miles until they reached the city.
It’s easy to see why a boy from a small market town would dream of an adventure in Smyrna. It faced outward, to the sea, towards Europe on one side and Asia on the other. Behind it, the hinterland, which included Ödemiş, seemed a world away. Smyrna was known as the ‘insolent’ city: the town’s valis, local governors, were often men who had been banished from Constantinople for their opposition to the sultan. Inhabitants of the city were skilled at circumventing the sultan’s strictures and enjoyed religious and economic freedoms not at all typical of the rest of the Empire. Even the local newspaper was careful in its reporting of the city’s social activities to avoid angering the sultan. Its tolerant atmosphere and prosperity was a contrast to other, war-ravaged parts of the country. On Smyrna’s streets, traditional Ottoman subjects wore turbans, fashionable Turks wore the fez, Greeks wore flat-brimmed caps, and Americans favoured broad-brimmed straw hats. Baggy Zeybek–style pants were banned: at the railway station, men queued to hire European–style trousers for their visit to the city. People who considered themselves sophisticated eschewed Turkish and spoke Greek and French.
Above the cries of sherbet and fruit sellers shouting their wares, Greeks yelling over games of cards through the open doorways of cafés, the ever-present barking of dogs, and the sputter and roar of motorcars, the bells of St Photinia, taller than the minarets of the mosques, rang out across the city at the same time as the call to prayer.
On Frank Street, bakery windows were full of French cakes. Muslim women wore transparent veils or no veils at all, and close-fitting clothes that showed their figures. At Bon Marché and Petit Louvre department stores, young women entered iron-grilled elevators that took them upstairs to be fitted in the latest fashions copied from French and American magazines. But although the city’s tolerance of diverse religions, cultures, and nationalities might have been part of its charm and was the secret of its wealth, it was also part of its downfall.
The Kordon, the long street that ran along the quay, with its marble-fronted houses facing the water, was crowded with camel trains loaded with cargo. Some caravans travelled with as many as 1,500 camels, bringing in Eastern luxuries — carpets and rugs, silk and cotton, baskets full of lemons — and taking back Western goods — sacks of spices, watches and clocks, Singer sewing machines. The bay bristled with ships and sailing boats, steamboats and caïques. As night fell, the traders packed up and the quay became a promenade. The pale marble façades of the buildings glowed against the night sky. The cafés below lit up, and music floated out across the water as far as whichever battleship was moored out there — a fusion of Greek and Turkish music they called rebetiko. Wharf workers, tough men who hauled sacks and carried heavy loads all day, played cards with sailors who had come ashore for the night. Above them, on the café walls, hung portraits of the Greek king and queen.
This mixing and intermingling — of languages, religion, and culture — was likely heady stuff for a curious mind. To nine-year-old Muzafer, Smyrna was still a magical place.
But his happy wandering through the streets with his friend that day was cut short. He was grabbed from behind by his uncle, a doctor in Smyrna, who shook him furiously. What was he doing? Didn’t he know how many people were out looking for him?
This time, Sherif returned to his family unscathed, his head full of the magic fairytale city, but he wouldn’t always be so lucky.
11
Burning Memory
Once I boarded the train at Ödemiş, I couldn’t wait to get to Izmir, the city that had been known as Smyrna when Muzafer Sherif was a boy. Ödemiş had felt like a secret that I couldn’t crack, but I had read a lot about the almost legendary city of Smyrna during the period that Sherif had lived there, and I was excited to see it. In addition, one of the academic experts in Turkish psychology I had emailed was based at a university there, and I was hoping to meet them and hear their interpretations of Sherif’s research against the backdrop of Turkish history.
The train sped through idyllic scenery: green fields, with the sun burning off the haze of clouds, and women bent over crops, their bright headscarves fluttering, a rainbow of irrigation water arcing in the sky behind them.
It passed through şirinyer, where Muzafer Sherif had been a boarder at the International College of Smyrna, founded by Christian missionaries. Up and over the squat NATO building that stands on the busy corner of the street in Izmir, over the tops of the trees, you can see the clock tower of MacLachlan Hall. In 1918, thirteen-year-old Muzafer Sherif arrived with his trunk, excited to pass through the ornate gates, up the driveway lined with cypress, and into one the most exclusive schools of the Ottoman Empire. Boarders came from as far away as Greece and the Aegean Islands; day boys arrived by steam train each morning from Smyrna, getting off at the place known to locals as şirinyer but the missionaries had called Paradise. The school was 250 feet above Smyrna, and a mile and a half away, in a lush green valley surrounded by hills covered in wildflowers, with snow-capped mountains to the east. Situated on choice farmland, the property included a vineyard, orchards, a vegetable garden, and a large field for crops. Each of the more than a dozen faculty members had their own house that accommodated their families and servants. Beyond the school wall, in a dip in the valley, ancient Roman aqueducts spanned the river and, nearby, a railway station connected Paradise to Smyrna. It was a place where a boy might forget about war.
Today the farmland is gone, the hills are covered in houses, and şirinyer is a suburb of Izmir. The school is fenced off, swallowed up by NATO, who use it as part of their headquarters. As the train passed, I scanned the skyline, the rooftops over the spires of minarets. I’d seen a photo of the school’s distinctive clock tower rising above the low red roofs of surrounding barracks, the dark green of the pencil pine rising up like the tip of a paintbrush beside it. But the train was going too fast; şirinyer and the clock tower flashed past.
School photos of the period showed young men in the school’s uniform of suits with crisp white shirts and ties, seated around a long table set with silverware and crockery in a formal dining room, being waited on by servants. All the students came from affluent families, and for some Muslim parents such as Muzafer Sherif’s, a wealthy ‘foreign’ school with mo
ney to spend offered a better education than a local Ottoman one, even if it was Christian.
Many of the students who attended school with Muzafer would go on to prestigious universities in Europe and abroad, including Switzerland, England, and America. Others wouldn’t live that long.
I knew of course that Izmir was a transit point for refugees on their way to Europe, but before I arrived, I wasn’t prepared for the scale of it. Turkey’s third-largest city has always been known as a progressive place with a relaxed atmosphere. But it was crowded: the streets were jammed with traffic — drivers leaned angrily on their horns — and the footpaths thronged with ceaselessly moving crowds. In the hotel courtyard, turtles swam in circles in a tiled blue pool as if trying to find an escape.
My room wasn’t ready, so I headed for the Kordon, the seaside walkway fringed with palm trees that had been such a magnet back in Sherif’s day. Izmir sits on the sweep of a bay surrounded by mountains. Over centuries, its houses and buildings climbed from the flat land of the shore, up the hill, towards the castle at the top. But the geography of Izmir confused me. In my mind, all streets led to the waterfront, yet there was a busy road running parallel to the sea, separating it from the rest of the town.
Instead of the cobbled walkway along the waterfront, the Kordon was now a concrete path lined with lawns of trimmed grass, and beyond that, a jumble of pastel apartment buildings and hotels facing the water. The promenade was largely deserted. Turkish flags jangled against flagpoles in a relentless wind that flattened my hair and made my eyes water so that I turned my face away from the blue of the bay. Then I noticed the small family groups: mainly women sitting on the grass with surprisingly quiet small children. There were more sheltered spots to sit, but they sat in the full blast of the wind, facing the water and the sight of Lesbos, just 6 miles away. Some talked, but mostly they were silent — looking hopeful or hopeless, I couldn’t tell. It was a tableau repeated the length of the Kordon. As I passed, I glanced over at each group trying to guess where they had come from — Syria? Afghanistan? Iraq? — thinking on the circumstances that had landed them here.