Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (49 page)

For a moment, I stared. He had an almost circular face, rather flat,
framed
by a bobble hat and a wispy beard. His eyes were slightly feline, and set wide apart and high up in the skull. It was a strange face; and yet I had seen it many times before – in manuscripts, in silver and gold on bronze, in lustre on ceramics. It was the face of the steppe peoples, of Mamluks, Khans and Ilkhans – a young face, in its mid-twenties, but also a fourteenth-century face. ‘
Al-salam alaykum
,’ I said.

‘
Wa alaykum
’, he replied, equally surprised, but in good Arabic – I could tell from that much, ‘
al-salam
.’

‘Where did you learn Arabic?’ we asked each other, simultaneously, and then both laughed. I told him, and explained what had brought me to the Crimea. The imam of the Mufti Mosque had learned his Arabic, he said, in Tataristan. Nina watched us silently. She was in Feodosia, the imam and I in Kaffa.

Inside the prayer-hall, he sketched in the mosque’s history. It was founded in 1623; a century and a half later, Potemkin gave it to the Catholics among his forces who had settled here, to use as a church. Only with the return of the Tatars in the 1990s had it become a mosque once more. ‘And now we are expanding,’ he said, indicating a growing island of carpet on the bare floor. Suddenly he glanced at his watch. ‘You must excuse me. I have to call the
adhan
. You see, we have no muezzin.’ I wanted to ask him more, but God came first. After all, He had been kept waiting long enough: there were two centuries of devotions to be made up for. ‘You will join us for the prayer?’ he asked me, expectantly.

‘I’m a Masihi,’ I replied.

His face fell very slightly, like a soufflé taken from the oven, then reinflated. ‘It … it is good to speak Arabic. I hope you will return.’

Outside, I paused at the street gate and looked back towards the bitty stonework of the prayer-hall. If this was three hundred years too late, what had happened to IB’s mosque? Then, something caught my eye, in the arch above the doorway: the stones were joggled – jointed together with a slight jigsaw kink. For a building of 1623, it was a very fourteenth-century feature … Perhaps I was becoming obsessive, seeing fourteenth-century profiles everywhere. The call to prayer sounded out, amplified, astonishingly loud in the bell-less hush of Feodosia.

After our visit to the mosque Nina was, for once, subdued. She was back on form though when I went that evening to supper in her
flat
, in a block in the suburbs of Feodosia. At the door I was greeted by the earthy smell of
bortsch
and by Marco Polo – Nina’s terrier. He sniffed at my trousers; I sniffed at his name.

Nina was giving a private class to a student (I noticed the indispensable Bonk between them on the table). While she took him, macaronically in English and Russian, through a reading comprehension on the manufacture of macaroni, I dipped into an English-language guidebook to the Crimea. The peninsula, I learned, is ten times the size of Luxembourg; Yalta boasts an obelisk commemorating Lenin’s decree, ‘On Utilizing the Crimea for the Treatment of Working People’; Planerskoye is home to a Museum of Gliding and Parachutism. There were statistics on the production of
champanskaya
and hosiery. All esoteric stuff; but, I reflected, my own interest in the Crimea – in the visit of a Moroccan who had been here for a few days in 1332 – was no less so.

Later, over supper, I realized that my close focus could also be seen as tunnel vision. I was complaining about the price of cigarettes, which had risen by a fifth in a single day. I asked Nina if she thought I’d been cheated.

She laughed. ‘Have you not heard? The rouble fell, more than one month ago – down, down! Now it is affecting our economy here. We Russians, the Ukrainians, your Tatars … no one is safe.’

I admitted I hadn’t heard. Nina shook her head slowly, as if at a hopeless student. ‘Before 1991 we knew our future. Now it is shock after shock. We continue as we can; but this shock has been the hardest. Viktor Chernomyrdin – in case you do not know,’ she said pointedly, ‘he was the Prime Minister of Russia – compared it to the Tatar armies riding through the land, destroying. And you are not aware of it because you are busy with Battutah!’

Later, back in the hotel, I remembered Chernomyrdin’s comment. So far I had met only one Tatar, but the Russian national conscious, it seemed, contained hordes of them. It was understandable, as the Tatars were the only force ever to have conquered its national home. In IB’s time, the princes of Muscovy were little more than tax collectors for Özbeg; their bid for independence fifty years later was answered by the sacking of Moscow by his grandson. Chaucer heard about it – ‘in the Londe of Tartarie/There dwelt a King that werried Russie’. Seven hundred years on, the Tatars were still apparently werrying the Russians. Perhaps that fourteenth-century face which for
me
suggested delicate ceramics and opulent metalwork had, for Nina, conjured up more threatening images.

*

I hadn’t realized the savagery of economics on the rampage. The following morning, the hotel cook joined me for coffee. I pieced her story together from her few fragments of English. She had been a naval architect. Now there was no money and no more navy to design. The kitchen of the Hotel Anonymous, as I thought of it, was the only place she could find work. The brief personal history was by any standards a tragedy. And yet, like Nina, she was stoical and stylishly clothed, and she shrugged magnificently when I asked her about the future. I left her frying breakfast eggs, dressed for a tea dance, and all for eight pounds sterling a month.

I went to look for the imam but the mosque was locked. Instead, at the southern end of the town, I came across his mirror image. The setting was familiar: towers staring at the sea and wind keening through the power-lines – like Sinop, but several degrees colder, many shades greyer, and gnawed by decay. Bastions rose like shattered tombstones out of a graveyard of burnt grass and broken glass. A stream turned out to be a sewer; a children’s playground was smashed and abandoned, the swings rusted into rigor mortis. Several medieval churches and chapels stood among the desolation. I entered one of them and saw the faint remnants of a fresco, a line of apostles turning their faces towards a seated Christ – faces without features, lepers’ faces. There had been other figures but only the lines of their drapery survived, turning saints into shrouded spectres. There was no romance in these ruins. They looked like the aftermath not of time or economics, but of a plague.

Only one building showed any sign of being looked after, a church with a high drum-shaped lantern topped by a new and tinny metal dome. Outside it three men were mixing cement and laying paving stones. One of them had the long beard of a priest. Like the imam, he was trying to provide something to latch on to in a disintegrating world.

*

I thought I was the only foreigner in Feodosia, until Nina invited me to supper again, to meet another protégé of hers. He was an Austrian
haematologist
called Gerhard, and he had brought his internet girlfriend Nadia – like Nina, a Feodosia Russian. Also present was Nina’s daughter Natasha, visiting from distant Nizhny Novgorod.

‘I am helping Nadia’, Nina explained, ‘to express herself to Gerhard.’ Nadia grinned and recrossed her legs. She was a strapping girl, built like a nutcracker, and looked quite capable of expressing herself without any assistance. She reminded me of the traveller Ibn Fadlan’s comment on the Volga Rus: ‘Never have I seen a people more perfectly formed. They are flaxen-haired, fair-skinned and tall as palm trees.’ As we ate, I quoted the description; then, tactlessly, followed it with IB’s own picture of the Russians: ‘They have red hair, blue eyes and ugly faces, and they are a treacherous folk.’

‘That is not true!’ Nina retorted. Her opinion of my Battutah, never high, sank lower.

It was late when we left, and Nina warned Gerhard and me not to speak English. It seemed a strange piece of advice, but she explained that there were many bad men about at night. I remembered the worried looks in Turkey when I had mentioned my trip to Kırım. We flagged down a taxi, the only vehicle about. Nadia sat in the front and engaged the driver in conversation, Gerhard and I in the back. It was almost impossible not to speak; throughout the journey we quivered silently with
champanskaya
-fuelled giggles, while the driver threw us dark looks in the mirror.

*

The following day, as I was finishing lunch in a restaurant, I spotted the imam walking past outside. I quickly paid my bill and trotted off in pursuit, but he had disappeared. I was keen to find out more from him about the history of the mosque. Whenever I went there it was shut, and this brief sighting was my only other glimpse of him.

I was to find another clue in Stary Krim. IB had hired a wagon for the twenty-five-mile journey; I hired Viktor, a chunkily built taxi driver who, Nina intimated, might come in useful for other reasons. ‘Beware!’ she warned. ‘Stary Krim is
not
a good place.’

My expectations of prowling post-Soviet mafiosi were unfulfilled. IB’s ‘large and fine’ city of al-Qiram felt more like an overblown village, with small neat houses set in orchards heavy with russet fruit. We made for the minaret of Özbeg’s mosque, which I had spotted on my journey to Feodosia. Again, building work was in progress – the
stonework
had been repointed and a fine wall was growing around the compound. The doorway of the mosque was framed by looping arabesques and bore an inscription, in which I made out ‘the exalted Sultan Muhammad Özbeg Khan’ and the date
AH
713 –
AD
1314. Below this was something instantly familiar: in the arch above the door itself, the stones interlocked with the same jigsaw joints that I had seen in Feodosia. The similarity in profile seemed too close for coincidence. I couldn’t prove it, but I felt certain that the Feodosia mosque of 1623 incorporated a much earlier structure – the very one in which IB had stayed and made war on the churchbells.

An elderly Tatar approached as we were inspecting the doorway. At first he eyed us warily; but when I greeted him in Arabic, he smiled. He could do no more than return the greeting, so I switched to my meagre Turkish. Thanks to the Turkification of the Golden Horde under Özbeg I was able, seven centuries on, to hold a makeshift conversation with Kamal. The mosque, I learned, had an imam-preacher and a muezzin; the community was pouring money into the building, to restore and beautify it. The building, though, was heavily padlocked, and the key ‘unavailable’. I never saw inside the Tatar holy of holies.

Wondering what had happened to the notables IB met – the governor Tuluktumur, his sons Qutludumur and Sarubak, the
shaykh
Zadah al-Khurasani, and others in a list of similarly magniloquent names – I asked Kamal if he knew of any tombs. He smiled grimly, glanced sidelong at Nina and Viktor, and said something about Russians. When I told him I didn’t understand he began a vigorous mime of digging. Nina spoke to him in Russian, then said, ‘He was telling you about the archaeologists.’ I looked at Kamal, who was still grim-faced, and thought: one man’s archaeologist is another man’s bodysnatcher.

We found what was left of the graves at a house on Lenin Street. Viktoria and Aleksandr, the resident Russian scholars, were personally innocent of grave-robbery – the despoliations had taken place years before. They took me around the ‘lapidarium’. Several of the gravestones were dated, tantalizingly, to the 1330s – the decade of IB’s visit; I looked in vain for names on his list. Saddest of all, the Tatar nobles and their cosmopolitan camp-followers had ended up as jumbles of bones wrapped in newspaper. In life, they had been sticklers for protocol: IB remembered the governor’s major-domo announcing arrivals in the audience chamber, ‘“
Bismillah
, our lord
and
master, the
qadi
of
qadis
and of magistrates, the elucidator of cases and of rules of law,
bismillah
…
Bismillah
, our lord So-and-So al-Din,
bismillah
…”’ Now they mingled, promiscuous, anonymous, unceremonious as cod lots, in sheets of old
Pravdas
. This charnel-house, this graveyard of a graveyard, was a sundering of people, of history, from place. Perhaps it was no less calculated than Stalin’s expulsion of live Tatars.

My spirits rose as we drove down a track in the woods to investigate another Battutian lead. ‘Outside this city’, the traveller heard, ‘was a Christian monk living in a monastery, who devoted himself to ascetic exercises. He was able to fast for forty days at a stretch, after which he would break his fast with a single bean. He also had the faculty of revealing secret things.’ IB’s host, Shaykh Zadah, pressed him to visit this prodigy, ‘but I refused. Afterwards, however, I found out the truth of what was said about this monk, and regretted not visiting him.’

‘I know where this place is,’ said Nina, when I had read the passage out in the archaeologists’ house. ‘It is the Armenian monastery of Surb-Khatch, Holy Cross.’ The archaeologists had disagreed, pointing out that Surb-Khatch was built in 1338 – six years too late for IB. I was sceptical about dates. The mosque in Feodosia, after all, had every appearance of being a refoundation of an earlier building.

We arrived at Surb-Khatch, its drum dome rising out of a clearing in the forest. My suspicions about dates were confirmed by a scholarly looking young man who was working on its restoration, and who told us that it had been enlarged from an earlier monastery. Nina translated IB’s account of the ascetic; the man smiled and spoke. ‘He says that Battutah was right,’ she explained. ‘It was the custom of Armenian monks to break their fasts on beans.’

None of this, of course, was proof that we had found IB’s monastery. But, as we crossed a small walled courtyard and entered the church, the question slipped from my mind.

I had never seen anything like it. The west door was surmounted, like the mosques of Stary Krim and Feodosia, by a joggled arch: pure Mamluk. A blind arch higher up was carved with thick, interlacing strapwork; above this were two pierced, tea-strainer bosses: pure Seljuk. Inside, the column capitals and recesses either side of the altar were decorated with
muqarnas
, the tiers of shell-like indentations with stalactite projections that are as Islamic as the call to prayer.
There
was even a
mihrab
, an Islamic prayer-niche, again rich with
muqarnas
; above it, in a tondo, was a nosediving dove. I blinked, and realized it was a font, let into the wall. I recalled the orientalizing entrance to my old parish church, built a decade or so before Surb-Khatch; but this was an entire building in which the architectural language had been written in the wrong script. It was utterly unexpected, totally successful, and made stranger still by its setting in the forest. Surb-Khatch was an architectural Briar Rose, of mixed parentage and extraordinary beauty.