Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (50 page)

Outside the church, the young man led us to a spring of water issuing from a wall fountain. ‘This’, Nina translated, ‘is called “the Practical Spring”.’

I asked her why. There was another short exchange. ‘Because’, she said, ‘its water makes you practical.’

I drank deeply.

*

Sounds of the steppe: a steady
birr … birr … birr …
of crickets overlaid with the off-beat rapping of other insects, and with the calls of unseen birds –
chuckety-chuckety-chuck, fweet … fweet
. They all came together, a laid-back, melodious jam session. And in the interstices, when for fractions of seconds the voices seemed to catch breath, you could hear the hiss of silence.

We had gone east out of the Crimea proper into its appendix, the antepeninsula of Kerch, following a straight wide road empty of traffic. At first we could see both seas, the Black, to the south, and the Sea of Azov to the north. They were the colour of slates in rain, the land ahead a watery blue. The air was warm. Now as we stood by the side of the road I deconstructed, then reconstructed the landscape. Mentally, I removed asphalt, power-lines, the few trees; then placed on the virgin grass herds of horses, a line of wagons moving slowly, lone figures stooping to collect dung in the skirts of their robes.

We resumed our journey and passed the Tatar settlement, or re-settlement, of Arma-Elli, a sudden place in the void, neat with palings; crossed the Cimmerian Dyke, dug in the Bronze Age as a last-ditch defence against the advancing Scythians, redug in the 1940s against the Germans, now filled with brambles; drove through Gornastayevka, once Marienthal, a colony of Swiss legionaries set up by Catherine the Great. For such an empty place it was busy with history.

Seventy miles from Feodosia we reached the outskirts of Kerch. They began with a post-industrial scene of grassy slag-heaps – except that the mounds were Scythian barrows where dead noblemen were buried with their households, strangled for the occasion. Then the road descended into a wasteland planted with clumps of apartment blocks. Finally we turned on to a grand seaside boulevard, hushed – like Feodosia – but for the sound of bells: not a peal or a carillon, but a chorus of muffled anvils. I remembered, for the first time in months, that it was Sunday.

‘We made for a harbour called Karsh,’ wrote IB, recalling his arrival in the Crimea, in Europe, ‘intending to put in there. But some persons who were on the mountain made signs to us not to enter. Fearing that we might run into danger, we turned back along the coast. As we approached the land I said to the master of the ship, “I wish to descend here,” so he put me ashore. I saw a church so we made towards it.’

The church was the scene of one of the most mystifying exchanges in the
Travels
, and I was keen to visit it and pick up clues to solve the mystery. The only possible candidate for it, according to the archaeologists of Stary Krim, was the eleventh-century St John the Baptist; there were, and had been, no other churches further along the coast. We reached it just as the sound of its bells began to die away,
calando
…
perdendosi
.
Tacet
. I could imagine no greater contrast to the Armeno-Mamluk church in the woods. St John’s, its vanilla stone banded with brick the colour of ripe pink peaches, was the product of an architectural
gelateria
.

A service had just begun, so Nina suggested a visit to the nearby museum. The museum director agreed that St John the Baptist was the only possible contender for IB’s church. She then took us on a tour of the collection. It was rich in red-figure ware and sculpture from the time of the Bosporan Kingdom, the small but energetic empire run here by Greeks and locals which spanned the Kerch Strait – the Cimmerian Bosphorus, hence the kingdom’s name. The director’s running Russian commentary on the exhibits was inlaid with Greek –
rhyta
and
kylices
and
oenochoes
. At one point she grasped a statuette of Aphrodite, turned it around, patted the goddess’s rump and pronounced her – with a twinkle in her eye –
kalipygaya
. I was mildly shocked.

Later, we returned to the church. The service was over, and we entered the west door via a small phalanx of antique almsmen who crossed themselves creakily as we passed by. ‘In the church,’ IB remembered, ‘I found a monk, and on one of the walls I saw the figure of an Arab man wearing a turban, girt with a sword, and carrying a spear in his hand. In front of him was a lamp, which was alight. I said to the monk, “What is this figure?” and he replied, “This is the figure of the Prophet Ali.” I was filled with astonishment.’

As well he might have been. A Christian icon – and surely it must be, with the lamp burning before it – showing not only an Arab, but the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, promoted by a monk to prophethood? It was an enigma which I had spent some time turning over, viewing it laterally, vertically, diagonally. The turban might have been a halo seen in the flickering half-light of the church; the spear and sword were attributes of warrior saints and archangels. But why Ali? Obviously, IB had misheard. ‘This looks like a natural confusion with Elias [Elijah],’ said Gibb in a footnote, ‘the Greek genitive of which is Elía.’

The problem was that the iconography simply didn’t fit. In the restored church in Feodosia, a helpful icon painter had produced his catalogue of patriarchs and saints by numbers. We turned to an image of Elijah. The prophet was shown with a narrow face and long pointed beard; he had no sword or spear. In Stary Krim the archaeologists had agreed that the identification with Elijah seemed impossible. They had then shown me a drawing taken from a medieval fresco of St Theodore Stratilates, the archetypal warrior-martyr, which fitted well with IB’s description. The major difficulty here was the name, which by no stretch of the phonetic imagination could be garbled into
al-nabi Ali
.

During my earlier research, the same difficulty had applied to St George, my own original candidate for the subject of IB’s icon. I had then moved on to archangels and turned up a fourteenth-century icon of Gabriel with turban-like halo and spear. His wings could, in poor lighting, have become an Arab-style cloak. Archangel Gabriel …
al-nabi Ali
… -eli-Gabrieli. To be honest, I was flailing around in the dark just as much as IB.

The church had been restored recently. Elderly ladies were polishing and sweeping and fussing about the bookstall. One of them told me via Nina that St John the Baptist was the oldest church in the world; then she added, with a sly smile, ‘It’s older than the Vatican, you know.’

An irredeemable schismatic, I went off to examine the iconostasis. I had hardly dared to hope that IB’s Prophet Ali might have survived; as it was, all the icons were brand-new. At least, I thought, iconography was a fairly conservative art and there might be some clues. There was St George, with sword and spear, but for his name the perfect Prophet Ali; there were the archangels Gabriel and Michael. And there was another category, which I hadn’t considered: bishops. Their bulbous Orthodox mitres could easily be mistaken for turbans, their long slender croziers for spears. But what about the sword? As I was pondering the question, the iconostasis door opened.

Father Boris, with his straggly grey beard, parchment-coloured hands, cassock and black velvet cap, looked like an alchemist. I explained why I had come to Kerch and tried out my thoughts on the possible identities of IB’s icon. While Nina translated, the priest cocked his head to one side and gave out little donnish sniffs of consideration. He thought for a while, then spoke. ‘To me it seems most
likely
that your traveller was looking at a bishop. The mitre and crozier, as you say, could have changed in his imagination into a turban and spear. As for the sword, there is one possibility that comes to mind: St Nicholas, whose remains are at Bari.’ And whose jawbone, I remembered, I had seen in Antalya. ‘He is a patron and defender of the oppressed, and as such he is sometimes shown with a sword.’

Nikolai …
al-nabi Ali
… Nikolai. Father Boris watched me as I mouthed the words.

‘Have I answered your question?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, unconvinced.

Father Boris took my hand. ‘What was the name of your traveller? Battutah … Then, you are welcome as a second Battutah!’

I thanked him, then read the final part of IB’s passage: ‘We spent the night in that church, and cooked some fowls, but we could not eat them because they were among the provisions we had taken with us on the ship, and everything that had been on board was impregnated with the smell of the sea.’ As Nina translated, Father Boris’s eyebrows rose. I quickly explained that I didn’t intend to emulate IB to the letter. We parted at the door, Father Boris chuckling with relief.

The enigma of the icon remained unsolved. But I left the church with a strange feeling: that, in a sense, I had continued IB’s conversation where he had left off, two-thirds of a millennium ago.

‘I think you will find nothing more of your Battutah,’ Nina said, intent on dragging me away from the fourteenth century. ‘Let us climb the Acropolis of Kerch and visit the palace of Mithridates Eupator, ruler of the Bosporan Kingdom. There is also an interesting memorial to the brave partisans who fought the Germans.’

As we climbed, I realized that this must have been IB’s mountain – ‘Some persons who were on the mountain made signs to us not to
enter
[the harbour] … We turned back along the coast.’ On the summit, Nina pointed out the columns of King Mithridates and the partisans’ obelisk. But I was contemplating a more chimerical history – the arrival of IB’s ship in the sweep of bay beneath us, heading for the harbour to the north-east; frantic waving from this hilltop; a change of course – under oar? there would have been no room to tack; the ship’s boat taking the traveller and his party ashore, dropping them just down there, where St John’s overlooks the sea, facing east towards Asia.

It was a superb vantage-point, this hill at the end of a continent above the shimmering Cimmerian Bosphorus: just the place for a shrine to al-Khadir. I thought of the peninsula at Sinop ‘on top of which’, wrote IB, ‘is a hermitage called after al-Khadir and Elijah’. Or rather, al-Khadir also known as Elijah. Also known, to the Christians, as St George.

And there – like the key you hunt for through your pockets, only to find you have left it in the lock – was the answer: Elijah/Elias alias Ali
was
George.

It was such an obvious solution that I dismissed it from my mind instantly. And yet, as we sat on the hilltop in the autumn sunshine, it reinsinuated itself. The Crimea in IB’s time was a place where doctors of Islamic law studied the fasting habits of Christian ascetics; where, in an Armenian monastery church, a font could pass muster as an Islamic prayer-niche; where, Nina had told me, the Genoese mint in Feodosia struck bilingual coins – heads Latin, tails Arabic. In so culturally bilingual a setting, what could have been more natural than for IB’s monk to translate St George into one of the other persons in that trinity of identification, Elijah? Or for that matter into Ali himself – who, like George, was the consummate holy warrior and gentleman? Three centuries on, talking religion with the traveller Pietro della Valle, Shah Abbas of Persia argued forcefully that Ali and St George (and, for good measure, St James the Greater) were one and the same. Perhaps IB hadn’t misheard.

*

On my last night in Feodosia, Nina held a farewell dinner party. Gerhard the haematologist was there, and strapping Nadia, tall as a palm tree. Natasha, Nina’s daughter, invited me to visit her: ‘Come, Timochka, to Nizhny Novgorod, and bring Battutah with you.’ Put
like
that it was hard to refuse; but Nizhny Novgorod was all but in what IB called the Land of Darkness, and I was not to be persuaded. Neither was Nina, when I suggested she rename Marco Polo, her terrier, ‘Battutah’.

Next morning I awoke once more to the sound of the sweeping of leaves. I bade farewell to the Hotel Anonymous and set out for the airport with Nina in Viktor’s taxi. We left several hours earlier than necessary, as Nina wanted to show me Bakhchiserai, successor to Stary Krim as capital of the Crimea. By the time it was founded the Golden Horde had fragmented into separate khanates, and it was here that the rulers of the Crimean fragment ran slowly to seed in their
bahçe-saray
, their pleasure-garden palace.