by Selcuk Altun
When two more people were alarmed by the word Executioner falling from my lips, I decided to call Altun once again. Withdrawing from the exploration site, I wandered around the neighbouring cemetery where the monumental gravestones of élite Ottomans stood, until I found the ruined tomb of Sultan Beyazid II’s şeyhülislam,5 who fathered 99 children. Walking in a still environment without walls to cut off the surroundings, I experienced a growing sense of inner ease and I turned back when I reached the eternal resting-place of Field Marshal Çakmak.
Hearing that I couldn’t find what I expected on the Eyüp slopes, Altun of the nervous giggle pointed me in the direction of Eugenio Geniale, who invited me to drink salep with him the following night at his home in the Genoese district of Galata. I was impressed by the global list of inhabitants in the hallway of the monumental apartment block that was the size of a chateau. Ascending in the tired lift, I was startled to recall the seventy-something Geniale who, under the pseudonym Engin Genal, had written books on architecture and was a walking encyclopedia who spewed out his knowledge at any opportunity. Just as I went to touch the bell, the door opened halfway with a rhythmic creak. I thought the blue-eyed giant with the reddish-grey beard resembled both Santa Claus and the Ottoman admiral Barbaros. Noticing I was looking at his purple apron, the Levantine art historian declared, ‘I was baking you an apple tart’ and as soon as he heard my name he began to announce at the door, ‘Arda actually means flowing water, it’s our only river that hasn’t changed its name since the early ages. The word used for flowing water or a spring in Armenian is aru and in old Farsi it’s adea ...’ I inwardly cursed the sadistic Selçuk Altun until his greeting was over. As I toured the spacious high-ceilinged flat, which even had a toilet with a view of Topkapı Palace, I stepped hesitantly on the silk carpets. On the walls of the living room hung plaques of Ottoman calligraphy with seals; and there were orientalist nude paintings in the bedroom. I thought the engravings by the utopian architect G. B. Piranesi perfectly suited the mahogany bookcases in his study. To my question, ‘Were you fond of Louis I. Kahn?’, he replied, ‘He used to sit in front of a Piranesi engraving in his chaotic office in Philadelphia.’
The attractive young woman whom he scolded in Russian, and who brought tart and coffee to the antique armchair in the drawing room where I was timidly ensconced, was clearly not his maidservant. Instead of coming to the main point of the evening and departing, I felt like making this ancient Levantine talk. I knew that indicating the family photo on the central table was enough to start off his autobiographical harangue: ‘I am the last member of a Genoese family that has lived in Galata since the fourteenth century and has never broken ties with Istanbul. Thanks to our ancestors, who grew wealthy by trading in textiles during Byzantine and Ottoman times, for the last 200 years no Geniale has had to work. I know the Byzantine and Ottoman monuments stone by stone. I recognize them from their moans with my eyes shut. I have visited every harbour city on this planet that has a museum. I spent so much time reading and learning languages that I had no time to write anything of my own. To decipher manuscripts in dying languages is a great passion of mine. If I go before him I will leave my 2,000 manuscript treasures to Selçuk Altun. The moment I lose my immunity to the beast that harasses the body and soul of Istanbul, I will flee to my sister in Genoa.’
I was touched by the grateful glow in his eye when he told anecdotes about his parents. (It is interesting how Levantines are not orientalized when it comes to a question of family.) As Anna, his companion, dashed from the living room after a reprimand for serving cognac in the wrong glasses, I announced my reason for being there: ‘Sir, I am preparing a piece for a competition for amateur novelists. My narrator is searching for his father’s killer, and has to find a succession of clues in six historic places. I don’t know why, but the second location I selected was the Executioners’ Graveyard. I’m sorry to say I couldn’t find it on the Eyüp slopes. Instead of giving up I thought that discovering the reason might help the flow of my work ...’
‘One shouldn’t be surprised at people who lack respect for the dead when they are incapable of embracing the living. We have become a people with a limited sense of history, enjoying the occasional successes on the battlefield and the silly tales of womanizing pashas. Even though the recruited executioners remained outcasts even in their burial, the fact that a cemetery was allocated at holy Eyüp is quite meaningful. During the uncontrolled expansion of the city the place became a public cemetery. The insensitive people who have allowed the earth of the newly dead to be thrown on top of the old graveyard have damaged the historic fabric of Eyüp for ever.
‘Gigantic rectangular stones, roughly carved, used to be erected as headstones for the executioners. When the subject crops up again once every forty years I remember what a startling sight these dark, pitted and nameless stones presented as a group. The only help I can give you is to try and find a photograph in my archives that hasn’t yet seen the light of day,’ he said.
As soon as I looked at the faded photo in a Venetian cardboard box that Anna brought him I realized at once how I could arrive at the clue, and I could hardly refrain from shouting with joy. Handing back the photo while trying to conceal my excitement, I longed impatiently for morning.
On my way out I couldn’t resist asking how he and Selçuk Altun had met.
‘He came just like you to ask for help with the novel he was writing,’ he said, but when he added, ‘He really did write one’, I was embarrassed by a sudden, fleeting reproachful look in his blue eyes.
On the way down in the lift, I reproached myself for not immediately realizing his involvement in Selçuk Altun’s plot.
For the last time I went to the old Executioners’ Graveyard, consoled by the fact that İz wouldn’t press me even if she knew I was up to something. On my first visit I had noticed on my way down the hill the difference in one of the steps. I had observed in the photograph Geniale showed me that this particular step had been converted from one of the special headstones used in the Executioners’ Graveyard. Very respectfully I approached the old porous stone that looked as if a squad of executioners had fired hundreds of bullets at it and reflected that the aesthetic Geniale would foam at the mouth with rage if he saw the last monumental element of a historic site being used as a stepping stone. On two sides of a little piece of cardboard I pulled out from the largest crevice in the stone, ‘İZNİK’ and ‘NİCE’ were written in pen.
In primary school I had learned from my father that the city names of İznik and Nice were borrowed from Nike, the Goddess of Victory. In Istanbul, when you say ‘Nike’, the first monument that comes to mind is my father’s favourite – the fifth-century Kıztaşı (the Maiden Stone) in the Fatih district. I withdrew, happy to be near the Maiden Stone on the morning of 2 May.
Altun must have decided to give his plaything a double clue in case I took off for İznik. Was he amusing himself by treating me like a reasonably intelligent person in the first two rounds, but trying to raise the tension in the next? That night, awoken by a massive cramp in my left calf from a dream in which I learned that Altun was my father, I began to wonder about the extent of my mother’s relationship with this strange family friend.
Kıztaşı, the Maiden Stone
By the time of the Harkov lap of his psychiatric safari in the Ukraine, my uncle was physically exhausted but came racing back home. In her article ‘A Mirror of the Person Who Cannot Use Paper Money’, İz’s starting point was the inhuman way in which our paper money gets worn away and disintegrates, and suggested that our public toilets were dirtier than those in African countries. I’m wary of İz dishing up other articles in the same tone as my father’s reactionary writings.
During İz’s painful convalescence in London I used to take refuge in the bottomless pit of the city’s metro system to avoid seeing the healthy, lively, giggling faces of the young girls who flood the streets. (Even a part-time idler doesn’t tire of the gloomy world of the metro. I find the
songs of the illegal buskers that echo through its corridors therapeutic. The boredom of crowds of weary citizens waiting at the mouth of the tunnel becomes a tourist’s delight in a lunapark safari.) Apart from a certain apprehension that I might see Dalga coming up the escalator as I went down, I enjoyed the shelter of the underground. At the finish of the Athens Olympic Games, İz was concentrating on the US Open. I didn’t tell her – she might have taken it amiss – that she reminded me of the Swiss tennis-player Patty Schnyder. During the final of the women’s pole-vaulting, she said, ‘Come and see what a pretty girl looks like.’ But I was pleased when she failed to get very excited by the record-breaking Yelene Isinbayeva, who was just like a young Dalga.
The granite column erected for the Emperor Markianos by Tatianus, the governor of Constantinople in the fifth century, was known as ‘Kıztaşı’ (the Maiden Stone) after the sculptures of the Goddess of Victory (Nike) on the north panel of the pedestal. When the surroundings were cleared by a neighbourhood fire of 1908, a column seventeen metres high could no longer lie hidden in a private garden. The elegant grey stone column, formed of a single piece, had the look of an orphan just emerging from a fire. Whenever we visited the Maiden Stone after a feast in a pitta house in Horhor, my father would remember the note by M.S.,6 who crammed the Complete Illustrated Ottoman Encyclopedia into 350 pages, and he would laugh in annoyance.
The Maiden Stone gives its name to a quiet street in a dignified district and when I came across it for the first time after his death, I felt like a ship at sea sighting a friendly lighthouse. I had never noticed the care taken that the buildings around it should not exceed its height. It was as though the quiet locality that lived in a different era was silent out of respect and solicitude. The Byzantine monuments seemed to have hypnotized the neighbouring buildings and city-dwellers. A polite passer-by idling along even showed a concealed parking-spot in a side street to Hayrullah, who thought the Maiden Stone was a structure erected on the Independence Day celebrations at the time of Atatürk, and had then been forgotten. As I approached the column I felt it had shrunk. While not surprised that disgusting weeds had embraced the pillar, concealing it till it became a rubbish dump for plastic bottles, I couldn’t come to terms with the abandonment of a stone column, thus depriving history of an inscription that summarized 1,500 years of its past. At a time of column vandalism, I hated to see a campaigning poster for local government elections hanging at a height that only a giraffe could reach.
Like an amateur seer I approached the statue of Victory with apprehension. Seeing nothing bigger, I gently inserted my hand into a crack. When I thankfully withdrew it there were three centimetres of a small yellow pencil between my index and forefingers. I saw a few short words in Arabic, Latin, Greek and Armenian etched with a needle-point on four faces of the hexagonal clue.
To reward myself with a bottle of spring water at the end of the third round, I approached a little kiosk, but when I saw its tragi-comic poster I nervously withdrew.
It worried me that the name ‘Titanic’ on the shop door was either a joke or the product of a skewed mentality. I felt my neck prickle at an imaginary pair of eyes. If they didn’t actually belong to my guardian angel he would send them back where they belonged.
According to the owners of the Turkuaz bookshop, who thought I was writing fiction, my fourth clue was ‘The Oldest Sacred Building’. When I rang Eugenio Geniale he said, ‘If you’re not writing your autobiography you’re up to something very dodgy,’ and I thought he was going to hang up on me. The Holy Church of St John the Baptist, which was the oldest sacred building in the city, built in the fifth century, had been open for worship for 1,000 years and was re-baptized as the İmrahor Mosque. Now I could wait calmly and with pleasure for 12 May, satisfied that Selçuk Altun would be just a little more perplexed after every round.
The İmrahor Mosque
I was quite expecting some new eccentricity from my uncle when he invited me to dinner at the Pidos Pizzeria. In the reams of paper he brought along there were forty thought-provoking street names chosen from 48,000 locations in the index of the Istanbul Atlas. While we were drinking coffees on-the-house he was dreaming of the socio-cultural safaris he would follow from the names he put in a bag from which İz would choose twenty. To avoid upsetting the quiet mystery of these streets, he would take arty photographs of them. To struggle free from her own quagmire, İz would turn her days in the media merry-go-round of business and politics into a cartoon novel headed The Final Downfall of the Naive Mystic. The chief managers of the Sultan’s stables were called İmrahor. On the eve of the İmrahor project I met a dopey banker for a business lunch at the Four Seasons and was delighted to see in a strategic corner of the restaurant, my father’s friend Judith the pianist and her bibliophile husband Tunç Uluğ. I rose to greet them, sure the elegant couple wouldn’t ask me when I intended to get married, but noticing they were sharing a table with Selçuk Altun and his wife, I beat a hasty retreat. He might have been calculating whether he had crammed his fourth clue into the easiest hole as he was eating his risotto. On the way to Çamlıca I couldn’t bear the idea that he might use İz and Adil Kasnak as a tool and a hitman.
Somehow my father had never been able to include Samatya in his world, the one district, he said, whose name had never changed since the founding of Byzantium. I noticed that even cars driving along the depressing streets took care not to blow their horns. Apart from a few religious buildings scattered at intervals on both sides of the road, there was the pleasing sight of an abandoned Greek kiosk and an Ottoman mansion with a balcony. I couldn’t help stopping to eat tulumba, the cake soaked in syrup, in the Rumeli cakeshop and asked the whereabouts of the İmrahor Mosque. On an election poster by the road alongside the mosque which trailed along like a superannuated museum on its last legs, I wasn’t surprised to see, as well as an Armenian young man, a committee of elderly mustachioed candidates. The high-walled building opposite, which resembled a medieval tower, was converted to a mosque in 1486 by a sultan’s charismatic master of the royal stables.
The swarthy youngster saw me waiting passively at the gate of the building whose registration number was 193891, and swaggered over to tell me that the museum was officially closed and I could visit only by permission from some head office. I wasn’t deterred. Believing my tolerant companion wouldn’t mind, I took a good look at the enormous fig tree that spread across the courtyard and at the other huge trees whose names I didn’t know. Beginning at the south wing I followed the henna-coloured bricks of a powerful wall, and saw with pleasure the west wing embellished with the names of heroes from the eastern provinces, opposite a park with red-tiled paths that matched the colour of the secluded museum. Groups of women were seated at separate tables, veiled or in low-cut dresses as though it was spring. A bunch of pensioners dozed in the shade or stared vacantly around like finalists in a competition for the most tragi-comic face. I recalled sad photographs in the Istanbul Encyclopedia from Yesterday to Today of the remains of the obscure museum on the verge of turning into a rubbish dump. Like an unfinished Kahn project, the museum with its geometrical floor design as enchanting as a silk carpet was a remarkable monument. It had survived the 1782 fire and the earthquake of 1894, but in 1908 the roof had collapsed under heavy snow and now it would never be repaired. I walked through the main gate feeling uneasily that I was a citizen of a country that didn’t even have the sensitivity of an Ottoman stable master.
I pushed my old comb into an inviting crack parallel to the identification plate of the edifice and a piece of cardboard, the size of a matchbox, fell to the ground. As the afternoon ezan began, I picked up a fateful yellow document which consisted of the words ‘HADIM’7 and ‘ATİK’.8
I tried to figure out this fresh clue in the light of the first three. ‘Hadım’ and/or ‘Atik’ might be the nickname of a pasha who had a monument built to the Ottoman dynasty in his own name. According to the information in two different encyclopedias, Hadım Ali Paşa, hea
d of a religious foundation, was twice appointed Grand Vizier in the time of Sultan Beyazid II, and in contemporary sources was referred to as Atik Ali Paşa. (My father would have said, ‘There can’t be a more suitable word than atik to describe someone who can rise from pimping to becoming prime minister.’) The fifth clue must be the mosque at Çemberlitaş in the Atik Ali Paşa complex of buildings named after its philanthropic donor who converted the Kariye Church to a mosque.
The Atik Ali Paşa Mosque
My uncle’s mission was brought to an abrupt end when the locals on the various streets objected to him photographing their children without permission. On the eve of my expedition to Çemberlitaş, he flew to Stockholm to attend the funeral of his only cousin. While travelling he heard news that his contemporary, Bjorn, who had encouraged him on his series of controversial journeys, had died of a heart attack.
‘I feel death prowling round me on every side,’ he commented.