NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (52 page)

If I had arrived in Lesbos on my own, in a boat from Turkish Izmir, or on a Greek island-hopping ferry, with days on the island, I would have tried to make it work for me. I would have buttonholed a Lesbian, needled a landlady, glad-handed a Greek, and tried to create some rapport. But this was a one-day visit. I jumped puddles all morning, had lunch on the
Seabourn
and made another foray in the afternoon, all the time watching the clock. The food on board was excellent; there was friendship and good cheer and comfort. It was so easy for me to turn my back on the island and wait for the ship’s whistle to blow and for Lesbos to vanish astern.

Most of the passengers were getting off the ship in Istanbul. A few were going on to Haifa. Mrs. Betty Levy was threatening to stay aboard for another month or more. Her dream, she told me, was to be at sea for weeks—no ports, no tours.

This impending sense of departure gave our progress up the Dardanelles the following morning a gloomy air of abandonment, and the funereal
pall was not lightened by the knowledge that we were passing Gallipoli, and the two hundred thousand graves of fallen soldiers. The Dardanelles is like a canal, no more than a mile wide in some places, linking the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to the Sea of Marmara, where another canal—the Bosporus—divides Istanbul, and so on, to the Black Sea.

The Dardanelles is also the Hellespont of Leander, who swam back and forth to be with Hero; and of Lord Byron, in homage and in imitation. I had thought of swimming it myself—a mile was swimmable—but it looked uninviting in late October, with four- to five-foot breaking waves, and a heavy chop, with a cold wind blowing from Thrace on the north side.

“Freeze the vodka,” Jack Greenwald was saying to the waiter in French, preparing him for the caviar course at tonight’s dinner. “Wrap the bottle in a wet towel, put an apple in it for taste and keep it so cold it gets syrupy. Do you follow me?”

The bloody battlefield of Gallipoli was now the little Turkish village of Gelibolu, mainly fisherfolk, and where Xerxes and Alexander had marched their armies across on pontoon bridges, where Jason had sailed with his Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, there were rusty freighters, and more villages, and a town, Canakkale—some mosques and minarets visible, along with the factories and the clusters of houses. But it was wrong to expect anything dramatic. It was an old sea, of myths and half-truths and sound bites of history; its periods of prosperity and peace had been interrupted by even longer periods of disruption and pillaging. It was the center of many civilizations, but there had always been barbarians at the gates—and inside the gates.

Yet so little was left of the Mediterranean past that it was possible to travel the sea, from port to port, and never be reminded of the ancients. Even the recent brutality of Gallipoli was buried on the featureless shore—just another cemetery. There were so many graves on the shores of this sea.

Fog rolled in, dusk fell, blurred lights shone from the shore, some indicating the crests of hills. And then in this mist, a nocturne of misty light, there emerged and remained printed on the night a vision from the past, of a skyline that was purely minarets and towers, and mosque domes and bridges and obelisks, like a promise made in Byzantium that was being honored in the present. We had crossed the Golden Horn.

Closer to the European shore, which is the site of the old city, their
features were more distinct, first the squarer lines of the Topkapi Palace, then Agya Irene, and the fifteen-hundred-year-old Agya Sophia, every brick intact; and behind its minarets, the six minarets of the Blue Mosque, and on the crest of the hill Nur Osmanye—the Light of God—the thick Byzantine fire tower, Yeni Mosque beneath it, at the end of the Galata Bridge, and beyond the vast almost unearthly masterpiece of Sinan, the Süleyman Mosque, pale and glittering even in this shifting fog.

Ferries were crossing the Bosporus, passing the
Seabourn
, hooting, their lights illuminating the sea and giving the scraps of hanging fog the shimmering and golden texture of an antique veil, a little tattered and brittle, perhaps, but still usable for conveying mystery.

Just before I left the
Seabourn Spirit
, Jack Greenwald took me aside and gave me a gaily wrapped present. Inside was a Turkish lapel pin and his Household Cavalry tie.

“Wear them both,” he said. “The pin will be useful here in Turkey. The tie is helpful everywhere.”

“I’ll feel like an imposter wearing this tie.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“And isn’t it an insult to your regiment?”

“Not at all,” he said. “My regiment wasn’t half as impressive as that one.”

“Jack, do you mean you weren’t a member of the Household Cavalry?”

“Oh, no, I was in another regiment—you wouldn’t be impressed by that one,” he said. “I only wear ties from fancy regiments. I get good results too. I’m always being saluted when I’m in London.”

            
L
eaving the comfort of the
Seabourne Spirit
was so much like a secular version of the Expulsion from Paradise that I thought I would brood less if I moved straight on to Syria. It seemed a prudent move, too. For all its physical beauty, Istanbul was passing through a turbulent phase. A recent bomb in the Covered Bazaar had killed many people, including three tourists. That at once caused an immediate eight-thousand-visitor cancellation to Turkey. The Bazaar bomb might have been the work of Kurds of the Kurdish People’s Party (PKK). But there were other bombers, fundamentalist ones, from the Great Raiders of the Islamic East and the Devrimçi Sol—the Revolutionary Left. Liquor stores were a frequent target; so were banks, because they charged interest on loans, and it is written in the Koran that “Allah hath blighted usury” (11:276).

There had been a rocket attack on the residence of the United States Consul General. It missed, but if it had hit its target the building would have been demolished. Ten armed men guarded the house now, and the Consul General, and most foreign diplomats in Turkey, did not stir outside without a bodyguard.

Istanbul, even under siege, was still magnificent. Never mind that W. B. Yeats had not actually seen the city—it was everything magical that he had written about it in his two greatest poems. It had known three incarnations,
as Byzantium for a thousand years, then Christian Constantinople, and finally Istanbul of the Ottomans. It was a labyrinth, ringing with the voices of hawkers, of ferry horns, of muezzins and of the plonking music that was called “Arabesque.” As Yeats implied. It was a place where there was no real distinction between life and art, it lay on both banks of the Bosporus, one continent nestling next to another—just a stretch of water, a ferry ride from Europe to Asia.

And though Turks moaned about the dangers in Istanbul, they were warier of the Turkish hinterland. My plan was to get a Syrian visa here, take the train to the south coast city of Adana and then trains and buses to Iskanderun, Hatay, Antakya (Antioch) and into Syria and down the Syrian coast.

“That is a bad area,” I was told.

“Which area?”

“Every place you mentioned.”

“But that’s my route,” I said.

“May it be behind you!” It was a Turkish expression:
Gechmis olsen.

Soon after arriving in Istanbul, I checked into a third-rate hotel and applied for a Syrian visa. Feeling sentimental, I walked down to the Asian side of the Galata Bridge and looked for the
Seabourne Spirit
on the quay at Kadiköy. But it had sailed away. Another ship was in its place—Turkish, rusty, slightly larger, no one on board.

I seriously considered swimming the Hellespont.

Ömer Koç had swum the Hellespont, though he, of all people, could have found an easier way of crossing that stretch of water. His was the wealthiest family in Turkey. I looked him up, because I had an introduction and because my Syrian visa was taking a while to come through.

“I’ve also swum across the Bosporus, to Europe, and back,” Ömer said. The Hellespont swim was in homage to Byron. “It can be a long swim—three miles or more, because the current takes you.”

“I was thinking of trying it.”

“This isn’t the month to do it,” he said.

A handsome young man in his late twenties, Ömer spoke with an English accent acquired as a student in England. He helped run the family business, Koç Holdings. The walled compound of Koç Holdings was something of a landmark, in that its grounds had been scattered with Greek pillars and marble ornaments and statues. They had been gathered by his father, Rahmi, from sites all over Anatolia, to make it look like an ancient site.

“He had a wonderful sarcophagus, but in the end decided not to put it on the lawn,” Ömer said. “He decided that it would be frightfully morbid.”

Ömer lived on the Asian side of the Bosporus in a palatial Turkish house known as a
yali
, a summer house. It was the narrowest point on the Bosporus, where Darius had built a pontoon bridge and marched his army across in the fifth century
B.C.
On its carefully chosen embankment, the
yali
epitomized the great absorbing tendencies of Turkish culture—an appreciation of light and land and water, and a blend of East and West; the Ottoman house in its maturity.

Ömer’s
yali
, built a hundred years ago, had been occupied by a princely son of a khedive, one of the Turkish viceroys of Egypt. When Ömer’s father, Rahmi, bought it in 1966, it had fallen into disrepair. Rahmi Koç totally revitalized it.

“I was very small when we moved in,” Ömer said. “I spent my childhood here, and I still live in it most of the time.”

I wondered whether Ömer had been intimidated by having been brought up in this pristine house with its delicate furnishings.

“My brothers and I realized that it was ornate, but my father didn’t worry about us making a mess,” Ömer said. “He’s not bothered by that sort of thing.”

He and his brothers, Mustafa and Ali, romped in the
basoda
—the formal living room, where guests were received—and climbed all over the banquettes, called
sedirs.
They especially loved being so close to the water, Ömer said. They dived off the landing stage, where their boat was moored, and this proximity to the Bosporus turned them into great swimmers.

Like his father, Ömer was a collector, a passionate bibliophile. His library was stocked exclusively with books on Turkish subjects. Evelyn
Waugh used to joke that his relative Sir Telford Waugh’s book,
Turkey—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
, “sounded like Boxing Day.” Ömer owned that book, and a thousand more rare volumes, along with old maps, weapons, incunabula, and treasures, such as Sultan Abdul Hamid’s personal letter opener, a simple dagger.

“This is interesting,” Ömer said to me, and showed me a copy of Lew Wallace’s
Ben Hur
inscribed to Sultan Abdul Hamid (1876–1909). And he explained that Lew Wallace had been the American Cultural Attaché from 1881 to 1885.

Ömer’s grandfather, Vehbi Koç, now in his eighties, was the patriarch of the family and a noted philanthropist. He had been called “the father of Turkish private enterprise.” His name was as familiar to the average Turk as Henry Ford’s was in America, and significantly Henry Ford II wrote a foreword to Vehbi Koç’s autobiography. Ömer gave me a copy. The book was not a rags-to-riches story, because the Koc family was not indigent. It was a modest Ankara family which, like most others in Anatolia, had no lights or running water. A real bath was “a public bath. This was a monthly expedition.”

In accordance with Turkish tradition, family members found Vehbi Koç one of his own cousins for him to marry. This arrangement was intended “to preserve the family fortunes, and with the hope that they would get along together.” He saw his wife for the first time at the end of the marriage week when, on the seventh day, his bride, Sadberk, raised her veil.

As a youth, Vehbi went to Istanbul and served an apprenticeship. “I noticed that the minorities”—the Greeks, the Jews, the Armenians—“led a better life. Their standard of living was much higher than the Turks’, so I decided to go into business.” He progressed from being a contractor, to manufacturing, to the production of foodstuffs and steel, to the making of cars (Fords and Fiats) and railways. He became by his own report a frugal billionaire and his book contained, among other things, advice on how to stay healthy. For example, “Find the right weight, and stick to it for life.”

“The best entertainments” from his youth, Vehbi Koç wrote, “were marriage and circumcision ceremonies.”

“Oh, yes, circumcisions are great occasions in Turkey,” Ömer told me. And it did not take place immediately after the boy’s birth. His own
sunnet
, or circumcision party, occurred when he was two and a half—and was
a joint one, shared by his brothers Mustafa (nine) and Ali (seven)—and was celebrated at the
yali
on the Bosporus. It was an enormous party—four hundred guests—and his parents indulged their sons.

“Normally the party is held the same day as the ceremony—to ease the pain, as it were,” Ömer said. “But my parents wanted us to enjoy it, so it was held fifteen days later.”