CHAPTER IV
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF TURKEY
AND THE TURKS
Travellers who describe the countries and peoples of the Middle East
have always attracted a wide readership according to Bernard Lewis(1)
and travel writing in the twentieth century continued to enjoy popularity.
One of the main changes that brought about an increase in the number of
travellers in the early decades of the century was the rapid extension
of railway networks around the world. The Orient Express, which made its
first trip in 1883(2) was described as '"the King of Trains
and the Train of the Kings" and in 1920s was christened "The Magic Carpet
of the East"'(3).
The conventional mythical train journey that reflected every aspect
of life by giving a sense of community with fellow passengers and by allowing
casual encounters with strangers, led to a genre of travel thrillers, such
as Murder On the Orient Express and accounts of train journeys such as
Stamboul Train, Orient Express and La Madone des Sleepings. For Graham
Greene train journeys were part of the excitement of holidays and visits
to relatives from his childhood, which offered 'all the necessary ingredients
of a novel, travel, adventure, suspense and final climax'(4).
The popularity of train travel also brought about the establishment of
societies and clubs for railway fans such as the Railway Club at Oxford
whose membership was composed of well-known literary figures like Evelyn
Waugh; and the Travellers' Club in London, whose only requirement for membership
was an achievement of travel a thousand miles from London (Abroad, 75-6).
After travel books such as Orient Express (1922) and Twilight in Italy
(1916) were presented by the Travellers' Library, Jonathan Cape started
to publish travel books in 1926. By 1932 Cape had produced 180 titles with
over a million copies in print. The popularity of Wide World Magazine,
which first appeared in 1917, also contributed to the recognition of many
travel stories, as is pointed out in Greene's Stamboul Train when an elderly
clergyman on the Orient Express says: 'I always read a Wide World when
I travel' (Abroad, 61).
As far as train travel writing is concerned there appeared a popular
example in the second half of the twentieth century, Paul Theroux, author
of The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and The Old Patagonian Express (1979),
for whom 'the ideal mode of travel is by train, partly because it affords
him enough distractions that he loses touch with his inner self'(5).
Theroux does not simply recount his adventures in foreign and familiar
places, but also reflects on the meaning of travel and travel writing in
his accounts:
Train travel animated my imagination and usually gave me the solitude
to order and to write my thoughts: I traveled easily in two directions,
along the level rails while Asia flashed changes at the window, and at
the interior rim of a private world of memory and language(6).
Although the train seems to have become less than ideal for the passengers
due to the fact that 'a combination of poor service, the cheapness of air-travel
and the short-sighted bickering of little countries in full cry killed
the Orient Express'(7), it is proposed by various writers
such as Paul Theroux as the best setting for mystery, romance and criminal
intrigues:
Like the trans-Siberian, it links Europe with Asia, which accounts
for some of its romance. But it has also been hallowed by fiction: restless
Lady Chatterley took it; so did Hercule Poirot and James Bond; Graham Greene
sent some of his prowling unbelievers on it, even before he took it himself
(Railway Bazaar, 19).
In his later travel book, Sunrise With Seamonsters (1985), Theroux draws
an overall portrait of the train once more in relation to its different
literary and artistic evocations:
The atmosphere is familiar, a blend of the cosy, the glamorous and
the sinister: so many national frontiers are crossed, the possibilities
for sexual stratagems and the occasions for disappearance, deception and
surprise are practically limitless (Seamonsters, 182).
And he adds that ‘every feature of the train had a novelistic dimension;
its route had a plot-like structure; its atmosphere was well-known. It
was made for the novel and it matched fiction exactly’ (Seamonsters, 182).
Since the last destination of the train from Europe to Asia is Istanbul,
many thrillers and travel books such as The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935),
Stamboul Train (1932)(8) and The Great Railway Bazaar
(1975) start with the journey to Istanbul, or with its arrival at the Sirkeci
Railway Station in Istanbul: 'Two days later, in the broiling sunshine
of the mid-afternoon, the Orient Express covered the last stage of its
journey to Constantinople'(9). Graham Greene emphasises
Istanbul as the final destination in Stamboul Train (1932): 'Constantinople,
for many of the passengers the end of an almost interminable journey, approached
him with the speed of the flying climbing telegraph-poles' (Stamboul Train,
17).
Among thrillers, Murder on the Orient Express (1959) is probably the
best known in building up a skilful combination of the exotic setting and
mysterious detective-plot. The story takes place on the train beginning
with a professional murder and ends up with the mystery revealed by Christie's
archetypal detective Hercule Poirot. Furthermore, the initial effects of
suspense in the novel are created in accordance with the moves and stops
of the train: 'we have run into a snow drift. Heaven knows how long we
shall be here'(10). And this stoppage is limited to the
thrilling news of the mysterious murder on the train: 'first this snow-this
stoppage... And now a passenger lies dead in his berth-stabbed' (Murder
on the Orient Express, 43).
As the Orient Express crosses Europe, it seems to draw a trail of lust,
murder and intrigue from Ostend to Istanbul. In Stamboul Train (1932) the
mystery starts when the novel introduces some suspicious passengers with
bizarre manners and conversation. As the passengers start meeting each
other the mystery deepens:
You ought to 'ave a sleeper', he said, 'going all the way like that.'
Three nights in a train. It's no joke. What do you want to go to Constantinople
for anyway? Getting married?'And the lady responds:‘Not that I know of.'
She laughed a little through the melancholy of departure and the fear of
strangeness. 'One can't tell, can one?'(Stamboul Train, 10)
Similarly, Paul Theroux makes use of this kind of conversation on the train
in order to increase the suspense in reader's mind:
He showed me a nick on his throat, then told me his name. He'd be spending
two months in Turkey, but he didn't say what he'd be doing... I guessed
he was about seventy. But he was not in the least spry, and I could not
imagine why anyone except a fleeing embezzler would spend two months in
Turkey (Railway Bazaar, 24-5).
Another aspect of books concerning Turkey is the pejorative depiction of
the cities, mainly Istanbul. For example, Prokosch pictures a southern
Turkish city, Adana as 'a foul and filthy city full of beggars... Nothing
seemed to flourish in Andana [Adana] except mud and the autumn heat and
mosquitoes'(11), and describes Istanbul as 'a dying city.
Everywhere were dogs. All along the shores stood hideous, empty, unpainted
houses' (The Asiatics, 38).
The prevalent reflections of Istanbul(12) as 'a traumatic
kind of city'(13) in most writings about Turkey, particularly
in popular fiction and travel accounts, seem to be constructed in relation
to different historical and religious bias as the imperial city has been
the cradle of diverse empires and civilisations such as Roman, Byzantine
and Ottoman.
When Ernest Hemingway stayed in Istanbul in the early 1920s as a correspondent
he sent letters and dispatches to The Toronto Daily Star. In one of these
dispatches, he expresses his discontent with the city of Istanbul:
From all I had ever seen in the movies Stamboul ought to have been
white and glistening and sinister. Instead the houses look like Heath Robinson
drawings dry as tinder, the colour of old weather-beaten fence rails, and
filled with the little windows. Scattered through the town rise minarets.
They look like dirty, white candles sticking up for no apparent reason(14).
In another dispatch, he describes the city as a dirty and depressing place
as he goes through it by train:
The train passes the old, reddish Byzantine wall and goes into a culvert
again. It comes out and you get flashes of squatting, mushroom- like mosques
always with their dirty-white minarets rising from the corners. Everything
white in Constantinople is dirty white (Ararat, 43).
When a new era in Turkish politics and administration started in the
second part of the twentieth century for reasons referred to in previous
chapters the country provided an arena for international espionage located
mainly in Istanbul and other big cities, and as a natural consequence the
number of publications depicting these issues also increased. For example,
Paul Bowles sees Istanbul as a proper setting for spy novels ironically
referring to some of its negative aspects(15).
Some thriller writers such as Ian Fleming or Eric Ambler, have chosen
Istanbul as the setting for stories of crime-intrigue, political espionage,
terrorist action, drug-trafficking and military coups. When Ian Fleming
went to Istanbul in 1955 he had already read Eric Ambler's classic thriller
about the city, The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) and then he drew some negative
pictures of the city: ‘Istanbul is a city in decay, the grimy wreck of
what was once, unbelievably, the greatest city in the world - Byzantium.
It is a shambling, grey, half-forgotten place, neither Europe nor Asia’(16).
His subsequent depiction of the city insults the whole country as well
as its people when he says that ‘the temper of this sullen city is as raw
as the back of one of those Turkish mules which will suddenly lash out
against the discomfort and indignity of life is this terrible country’
(The Life of Ian Fleming, 363).
In Istanbul, another recurring name is that of the Pera Palace Hotel,
which was built in the European part of the city, and used to be run by
minorities or non-muslims during the early decades of the twentieth century.
The Pera Palace generally appears as a meeting place in diverse thrillers
and travel accounts such as The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935), Stamboul Train
(1932), Orient Express (1922), The Journey Into Fear (1966), Among The
Cities (1985) and The Great Railway Bazaar (1975).
John Dos Passos stayed at the Pera Palace during his visit to Istanbul
in the early 1920s. In Orient Express (1922), he writes about the hotel
describing the city of Istanbul from the hotel window, while witnessing
an espionage-murder inside the hotel:
Downstairs in the red plush lobby of the Pera Palace there is scuttling
and confusion. They are carrying out a man in a frock-coat who wears on
his head a black astra-khan cap. There's blood in the red plush arm-chair;
there's blood on the mosaic floor... He was the envoy from Azerbaijan.
An Armenian, a man with a beard, stood in the doorway and shot him(17).
When the hero, Swithin Destime arrives in Istanbul in The Eunuch of Stamboul
(1935) he is taken to this hotel, and makes his first contact with Tania,
the Russian girl, who works for the KAKA - the illegal organisation, in
the book stall of the hotel (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 61). As soon as Graham,
the representative of the British armaments factory arrives in Istanbul
in The Journey Into Fear (1966) he holds his first secret meeting with
someone from the Turkish Intelligence at dinner in the Pera Palace(18).
Subsequent to his journey to Istanbul on the Orient Express, Paul Theroux
stayed a few days in Pera Palace Hotel, and he describes the decor from
a romantic perspective:
To catch a glimpse of oneself in a gilt framed ten-foot mirror at the
Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul is to know an instant of glory, the joy of
seeing one's own face in a prince's portrait. The decor in the background
is decayed sumptuousness, an acre of mellow carpet, black panelling, and
rococo carving on the walls and ceilings, where cupids patiently smile
and flake (Railway Bazaar, 45-6).
Jan Morris describes her first impressions of the famous hotel in a similar
way:
I always stay at the Pera Palas Hotel on the Galata hill, almost the
last of the old-school grand hotels to survive the invasion of the multi-nationals
- a haven of potted plants, iron cage elevators, ample baths with eagle
feet. It has been halfheartedly modernised once or twice, but like Istanbul
itself, it really ignores improvements and is settled complacently into
its own florid heritage(19).
Apart from Istanbul, the reader may be introduced to some other Turkish
cities such as Ankara, Izmir, Antalya, Kars, or villages which are used
as settings for poppy planting. The setting varies in accordance with the
nature of the action. For instance, where the military coups, revolution
attempts or diplomatic conflicts are concerned the setting tends to be
the capital, Ankara. Murder With Minarets, Diplomatic Death and Diamonds
Bid can be regarded as good examples of this kind as they all take place
in Ankara. Other Turkish towns, especially on the border of Russia in the
East and Syria in the South provide settings for political conspiracy and
terrorist conflict; Hand Out starts with a political murder in Kars, the
Turkish town on the Russian border, then the conflict extends down to the
South and is finally concluded in Antalya.
While some travellers such as David Dodge discuss the historic value
of the country, other writers are unable to conceal their prejudices and
tend to compare Turco-Islamic arts or architecture as reflected in the
palaces, mosques and minarets unfavourably with Christian churches, sculpture
and paintings. On his first observation of the city, David Dodge tries
to describe Istanbul with an artistic admiration for both Christian and
Turco-Islamic values praising the Santa Sophia (Hagia Sophia or Aya Sofya),
which is a Christian architectural masterpiece, and the Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet
Cami), a Turco-Islamic one:
The individuality is composed of hundreds of minarets, pointing the
eyes of a faithful towards Allah, the wails of muezzins at sundown, Byzantine
architecture, Islamic traditions,.. the accretion of thousands of years
of overlapping cultures from east and west; all going into making of a
city which is unique and which must be visited to be believed(20).
Showing a critical or suspicious attitude towards the Turco-Islamic features
of the city, Jan Morris remarks that 'the Ottomans built their vast Topkapi
Palace, crammed with vulgar jewellery, where the Ladies and Eunuchs of
the Seraglio gossiped life away in exquisite pleasure kiosks above the
sea' (Among the Cities, 198) while some others seem to present their aesthetic
evaluative opinions which are usually expressed as a preference for Byzantine
architecture over the Ottoman. For example, Dalrymple compares the architectural
features of two diverse cultures, Byzantine and Ottoman:
Ottoman mosques have never appealed to me. Although the exteriors of
the great Suleymaniye and Bayazit mosques in Istanbul are impressive, with
their shady cloister arcades and ripple of cupolas, their interiors are
always disappointing. They are simply pale imitations of Hagia Sophia,
without the latter's perfection of colouring (imperial gold and purple)
or form (perfect shapes; the square and the circle)...The result is pastiche,..as
far from the perfection of Byzantine architecture in Istanbul, it is all
the more so of the millions of identical maquette mosques erected over
the empire...There are none of the flutings or fantasies one expects in
Islamic architecture, no development of the ideas of Seljuk architects,
only an uninteresting, bastardised Byzantinism, lacking either the dignity
or grandeur of the original(21).
Citing earlier texts about the region such as James Creagh's A Scamper
to Sebastopol and Jerusalem (1869) and Armenians, Koords and Turks (1880
2nd. vol.), Philip Glazebrook notes that: 'Heavily decorated baroque minarets
hang above the lanes, impending Islamic banners, with something of the
menace of old Turkey towards the giaour'(22).
He interprets the Muezzin's call for prayer from the minaret in a humiliating
comparison of Islamic culture with western technology:
Never was an invention so abused as is the electric amplification of
sound abused by Asiatics, an example of the fact that a culture like Islam,
which has never invented anything, is sure to misapply the invention of
other races (Journey to Kars, 102).
The comparative picture of Turkey emerges when Glazebrook describes two
different Istanbuls: the Istanbul of Turco-Islamic culture and architecture,
and Constantinople, seen through Santa (Hagia) Sophia and Pera, the European
quarter of the city: 'To me the streets and buildings of Pera looked magnificent.
The mighty banks, the stone facades, how imposing and sturdy they were,
how European was the severe dark architecture shutting out the sky!' (Journey
to Kars, 177).
The former is described as 'less friendly than it used to be. Certain
factors - the rise of Islam, a despotic government, decreased tourism -
have created in the famous mosques a less warm welcome for Christian tourists
than there was a year or two ago' (Journey to Kars, 181). His disappointment
about Istanbul, which can be understood from his implicit statement about
a specific incident in Istanbul: 'Fences now keep us separate from the
Faithful, notices prohibit this and that in sharp tones; we enter very
much on sufferance' (Journey to Kars, 181), seems to be due to the fact
that he had some difficulty in entering the mosques of the city during
prayer time, because of religious or partly security reasons as the country
was under marshal law during the early 1980s.
Visiting various Turco-Islamic historical places in Istanbul, he expresses
a sense of dissociation and alienation:
Emeralds and foot-prints of vast size, intimations of tyranny, the
fearful courts of the Sultan-all serve this purpose of travel, all mark
boundaries as deep and wide as the pool of the Danube between Semlin and
Belgrade (Journey to Kars, 183).
His critical attitude turns into appreciation or even admiration
where places featuring western culture such as the Pera district are concerned.
His main interest during his stay in Istanbul, following his fascination
for the Victorian travellers, is the Pera Palas(23),
the hotel where most nineteenth-century travellers who visited Turkey used
to stay: ‘When you find that your own idea of perfection in the hotel line
is shared by so few, it isn't surprising that there are only a handful
of hotels like Pera Palas left round the world’ (Journey to Kars, 175).
Despite his discontent with the interior decoration consisting of 'dim
lights in huge-looking glasses; huge pictures, huge portraits, enormous
palms in brass pots, sofas so uncomfortable and very large' (Journey to
Kars, 176), he still perceives some similarities between the historic hotel
and his sense of an ideal home, the Victorian country house:
I suppose a Victorian country house probably is my idea of home. In
which case to find here beside the Bosphorus such a matrix - such a chunk
of Reality set down in this doubtful shadowy city - is wonderful luck (Journey
to Kars, 176).
Another attraction for Glazebrook is Santa Sophia, the Byzantine church
converted into a mosque after the Fall of Istanbul:
Amongst the works of man, Christian mosaics and pagan marbles touch
high points of achievement, but Santa Sophia compared to such things impressed
its visitors like a phenomenon of nature which transcends human architecture
altogether...In this Santa Sophia possesses the power essential to any
of the man-made Wonders of the world that I have seen, which is the power
to sweep aside all preparations made in your mind, and to hit you amidships
with an original force which makes you stop and stare. The Grand Canal
does that, and the Taj Mahal, and the skyline of Manhattan seen from Central
park; and so does Santa Sophia (Journey to Kars, 192).
Apart from a few places such as the Pera Palas and Santa Sophia, his overall
perception of the city, even from a tourist's point of view, is quite detrimental:
We still disliked the city, though the hotel was our solace. There
seemed to be none of the superficial attractions which made a tourist's
stay pleasant: no proper restaurants or cafes that we could find, no elegant
streets or shops; in stumbling about the steep broken pavements we saw
nothing but shabbiness and confusion, eyes full of dust, interest baffled
and rebuffed. We almost left in disgust (Journey to Kars, 172).
Although he tends to emphasise his awareness of the past of the country
and its people Glazebrook’s general perception of Turkey and its people
in the early 1980s is not so derogatory as that in many earlier texts,
which stressed 'hostility', 'intriguing scene of threat', 'laziness', 'dishonesty',
'false piety' and 'dirtiness' (Journey to Kars, 84).
Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond (1956), is a typical example
of the kind of comparison in which one culture and belief is represented
with exaltation whereas the other one is dramatically humiliated. Observing
the tough living conditions of Turkish women in the countryside, particularly
those working hard on the fields during her long stay in Turkey as a missionary,
Rose Macaulay points to a connection between the appalling conditions of
Turkish women and Islamic culture: '“Turks”, she said, “won't condone,
they won't coexist. And that old-fashioned religion they have will get
their women nowhere”'(24). She also adds an explicitly
Christian solution: 'There is nothing in the Gospels about women behaving
differently from men, either in church or out of it. Rather the contrary.
So what a comfort for those poor women to learn that they needn't' (Towers,
20).
Another pejorative representation of Turkey reflected through different
characters in the book comes out in the form of historical and cultural
comparison between the Christian past and the Muslim present of the country.
Due to their long historical and cultural backgrounds Istanbul and Trebizond
have been the focal points of this comparison in which Macaulay seems to
glorify Byzantine sites and places while criticising Turkish ones. In this
comparison mainly based on religious criteria, Macaulay tends to present
Islam as the fundamental obstacle to the actual emancipation of Turkish
women in the Black Sea region, presented through Aunt Dot; 'Aunt Dot grew
angrier and angrier about the Moslem treatment of women, and could not
wait for the A.C.M.S. to get its mission going' (Towers, 71).
Prior to the creation of The Towers of Trebizond Macaulay's early concern
about the issue, as has already been emphasised in her letters, goes back
to her personal contacts with other tourists during her stay in Turkey
in 1954 as well as her own observations in some villages and small towns
on the Black Sea. She raises this issue in one of her letters to Hamilton
(8th July, 1954):
Women are being ill-treated, having been looked on as slaves for centuries;
they walk while the man rides the donkey; they stay at home while the men
eat out in cafes and restaurants; they are pushed aside in the scramble
for tram seats (as I found - I never once got a seat) and almost pushed
into the sea in the stampede for getting onto a boat. A shipwreck among
Turks would be a poor time for women; none of them would even get on to
one of the boats. Nor have they (quite) souls. Nor may they eat with men;
not even the Consul's wife in her own house when her husband has Turks
to lunch(25).
She recounts the unacceptable practices of discrimination imposed on women
in those regions in both her letters and The Towers of Trebizond, practices
such as dressing differently, eating separately and not being allowed outside,
which seem to be based mainly on the traditional attitudes of the local
people rather than any religious principles. Macaulay tries to question
Islam as responsible for such discrimination as she writes to her friend
Jeanie:
By the way, have you a Koran? I shall like to see what it says about
women in Mosques. The German Archaeologist told me the men wouldn't let
the women be photographed, but men, being strong souls, can disobey without
their souls being destroyed by it, whereas women, whose souls are very
weak, can't. I wonder if the Koran also says women are 'unclean'. Moslems
think they are, but they may have thought of that for themselves(26).
While she makes a similar comment on Islam in another letter she refers
to the personal interpretation of another German tourist:
He thinks the women (outside the large westernised towns) will take
at least 50 years more to recover from the Koran and cast off their hot
muffling clothes. The Prophet was very firm about their not letting men
see their faces or hair. Perhaps in the Middle Ages it would have been
rather rash of women to let Turkish men see much of them. But the men aren't
told to behave decently, it is the women who musn't tempt them. He says
the women usually die early of such unhealthy clothes. He asked the Turkish
maid why she didn't dress like his wife in hot weather; she said she couldn't,
her religion forbade it. An awful life it must be. Besides being hot, they
are scorned and unfit to pray (Letters to a Sister, 166).
After Aunt Dot observes the status of women in this region as inferior
and exploited in The Towers of Trebizond, supposedly due to their religion,
she makes a general religious comparison in which Islam is held to be irrational:
I know it's a very fine and noble religion, but I'd rather have atheism,
it would make easier life for women. But we'll try and make Anglicans of
them. You know how religious women are, they must have a religion, so it
had better be a rational one (Towers, 19).
Moreover, upon coming across a group of Turkish students on the ship
to Trebizond she repeats her comparative interpretation of religions with
a similar emphasis:
And you students? One understands that you have largely left Moslimism
behind, it's so bound up with old-fashioned tradition and all that. But
what about Christianity? Dr. Halide is a Christian, you know, and you can't
call her behind the times. It's a most progressive religion actually. Have
you ever considered it? (Towers, 58-9)
As far as religion is concerned in The Towers of Trebizond, being a member
of an Anglican family from an Anglo-Catholic missionary society, Macaulay
appears to denigrate not only the Turks and their values but also Arabs
and other Christian sects. Besides calling Islam an 'old fashioned religion'
(Towers, 262), and considering the Koran as 'being most odd' (Towers, 167),
she also makes a prejudicial comparison of Arabs with Jews through Laurie,
after her arrival in Jerusalem, who says: 'I saw that Jews were more intelligent
and progressive than Arabs and would get further, but which race ought
to have had Palestine, or how they ought to have shared it out, is not
a thing to be decided by visitors' (Towers, 175).
Furthermore, while Aunt Dot suggests that 'never mind about missionaries.
I don't suppose any of them are specifically concerned, as we are, with
the position of women' (Towers, 19), she displays her critical attitude
to other Christian sects, an attitude which is figured out by Laurie at
the beginning of the book:
My aunt, therefore, had inherited a firm and missionary Anglicanism,
with strong prejudices against Roman Catholicism, British Dissent, and
All American religious bodies except Protestant Episcopalianism; she had
also inherited a tendency to hunt fish (Towers, 8).
As a consequence of her feminist enthusiasm about the problem of women
in general Macaulay shows some objections to Roman Catholicism mainly due
to its doctrine of gospel infallibility and its prohibition of intercommunion
as she exemplifies from her own experience:
When we were little girls going to the daily convent school at
Varazze for a time, the nuns wouldn't even let us join in prayers with
the other children; we had to sit down, lest the awful sin should be committed
of praying with little heretics(27).
In her analysis of Macaulay's biography and works Alice R. Bensen emphasises
that Rose Macaulay sometimes questions Christianity as well as Islam with
regard to gender issues and feels dissociated from the Church because:
she agrees with its critics that many of its doctrines are ill-founded,
that theology seems the only science which does not keep adopting its views
and its manuals to new knowledge as it turns up, that nothing in the world...
could be as true as each church thinks its teachings are (Rose Macaulay,
161).
In order to make Macaulay's religious ups and downs more comprehensible
she also quotes, in her Rose Macaulay (1969), from her letters to her sister
shortly before her death:
religious belief is too uncertain and shifting a ground (with me) to
speak of lying or truth in connection with it. One believes in patches,
and it is a vague, inaccurate word. I could never say 'I believe in God'
in the same sense that I could say 'I believe in the sun & moon &
stars'(S, 282). Always averse to bigotry in religion, during her last years
she 'made a point of taking part in the worship of various Nonconformist
churches'(S, 23); and, in the same month in which the book was published,
she said, 'I have started a new group, called Inter-communionists...'(S,
236) (Rose Macaulay, 161).
Setting out from Laurie's statement concerning Aunt Dot in the book itself
that 'then she remembered the position of Moslem women, and her missionary
zeal returned' (Towers, 42), Bensen tends to infer from the attitudes and
utterances of Aunt Dot that:
Though aunt Dot is a zealous High Church woman, her mission is motivated
even more by her feminism; and she sets forth triumphantly, in blue linen
slacks, holding scarlet reins, on the white camel-white plumes waving from
its head - to help Turkish women toward sexual equality by converting the
Moslems to the Church of England (Rose Macaulay, 159).
She shows a feminist reaction to the so called gender discrimination attributed
to the Church and the Gospels through Father Chantry-Pigg since she also
finds something concerning the position of women within the Christian context
unacceptable. When Aunt Dot criticises the gender obstacles imposed on
Muslim women she is interrupted by Father Chantry-Pigg during a conversation:
'As for women, they've got to be careful, as St. Paul told them. Wrapping
their heads in a religious tradition that goes very deep.' 'An oriental
tradition, said aunt Dot. 'Christianity', father Chantry-Pigg reminded
her, 'is an oriental religion.' 'Anyhow', said aunt Dot. 'Christianity
doesn't derive from St. Paul. There is nothing in the Gospels about women
behaving differently from men, either in church or out of it' (Towers,
19-20).
As for the depiction of the Turks in these works, they are either characterised
through the fictitious figures in thrillers or described by the authors
in travel accounts. As regards the characterisation in novels, there seems
to be a sharp distinction between the villains and heroes and heroines
in physical and intellectual terms. In almost every text, the smugglers,
drug producers, terrorists and other secondary characters, apart from some
stereotypes such as Colonel Nur, Alp Bey or the detective Nuri, are usually
Turks or from different ethnic groups living in Turkey, including Germans,
Russians, Hungarians, Romanians, Armenians and Kurds.
On the other hand, the heroes and heroines who are always physically
and intellectually superior, and fit enough to fulfil the operation by
risking their lives for the sake of their national interests and policy
are either American or British. As businessmen, spies, detectives, visitors
and company representatives they resolve the political and military conspiracy
and drug-trafficking, or prevent terrorist attacks, revolutionary coup
attempts and sabotage through applying their own superior methods and tactics.
In contrast to figures like Kazdim, the 'Eunuch of Istanbul' in the
first half of the century, it is possible to come across Turkish bureaucrats
generally in military uniform, and 'they have a western way of looking
at the world, intelligence spit and polish, and an appreciation of the
good life'(28). The best example of this Turkish figure
in thrillers is Julian Rathbone's Colonel Nur who is a middle-class bureaucrat
deeply rooted in family and country, and his junior colleague Alp Bey in
Diamonds Bid, Hand Out and Trip Trap. Similar is Nuri Bey of Joan Fleming's
When I Grow Rich and Nothing is the Number When You Die who sometimes behaves
as an intellectual private detective and sometimes as a philosopher whose
spirit is overstimulated by the great western philosophers; and Colonel
Haki of Eric Ambler's Journey Into Fear who is the chief of Turkish intelligence
section. He is described through a character in the novel as:
very chic and polished - a ladies' man. There is also a legend that
he can drink two bottles of whisky without getting drunk. It may be true.
He was one of the Ataturk's men, a deputy in the provisional government
of 1919. There is also another legend - that he killed prisoners by tying
them together in pairs and throwing them into the river to save both food
and ammunition,..You can speak French to him (Journey Into Fear, 33)
In the novels involving drug-trafficking in Turkey, besides various male
Turkish figures as villains or antagonists like Mustafa Algan of A Stench
of Poppies who runs the drug-business from his famous carpet shop, and
Barish Uz of Trip Trap who is a rich and well-known businessman in Izmir,
there are some prominent female figures as well. These female characters
either Turkish or foreign used to be wives, concubines, servants etc. in
the Sultan's harem, and now live in historical Kiosks or Yalis of Istanbul
in similar luxury through running the drug-business i.e. Mrs. Erim (Sylvana)
of Black Amber who is the key operator of the drug-trafficking and Madame
Miasme of When I Grow Rich. These women tend to be served and guarded by
male servants and safe guards like Ahmet Efendi of Black Amber who used
to be the ex-eunuch of the harem in service of the women. These types of
characters are pictured as slaves and unable to understand the consequences
of their actions properly.
Among the foreigners, the most striking villainous stereotypes are the
German agents and smugglers who try either to destroy Turkey or use it
in conformity with their political and military ideology. For instance,
the German stereotype is the arch-conspirator in the plan to rob the Topkapi
Palace in The Light of the Day, and it is also a German spy who attempts
several times to kill the British businessman while he negotiates with
the official Turkish authorities in order to sell arms to Turkey in Journey
Into Fear. It is also possible to see KGB agents chasing and assassinating
western spies as well as Turkish security and military people; Hungarian
mistresses who fall in love with the hero; Romanian assassins working for
the Nazis; Kurdish drug-smugglers, rebels and other types.
Characteristic of novels set in Turkey is the critical designation of
people with negative evocations. Apart from an exceptional number of high-ranking
Turkish bureaucrats such as Nuri Bey, particularly those stereotypical
military figures in thrillers such as Colonel Nur or Colonel Haki whose
determination and success in action can only be attributed to their western
mentality and technique, most Turkish characters are from the lower or
working class, and in specific references to their physical appearance
and clothing they are usually depicted as shabby, rude, uneducated, ignorant,
and unable to carry out anything serious.
Earlier, when Ernest Hemingway describes the people of Istanbul he also
introduces a note of prejudice, commenting that 'in the station are a jam
of porters, hotel runners, and Anglo-Levantine gentlemen in slightly soiled
collars, badly soiled white trousers, garlicised breaths' (Ararat, 43).
Dennis Wheatley expresses an extreme view through the character of Sir
George Duncannon when he gives a brief information about the historical
and political background of Turkey as well as peculiarities of Turkish
people to Swithin Destime on his way to Istanbul for the secret mission:
the Turks are almost entirely a peasant population, lazy, ignorant,
hidebound with tradition, accepting blindly as their rule of life on the
smallest issue the decisions laid down thirteen hundred years ago by a
fanatical soldier-preacher in the Koran (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 42).
When Graham Greene describes the Turks in his Stamboul Train (1932)
he uses a negative metaphor to recount their characteristics:
The Turkish gentlemen, drinking coffee, laughed and chattered and shook
their small dark feathery heads like noisy domestic birds, but their wives,
so lately freed from the veil, sat in silence and stared at the singer,
their faces pasty and expressionless (Stamboul Train, 213).
Julian Rathbone is also less than flattering in the prologue to The Pandora
Option (1990):
Dumpy women in shapeless cottons beneath black head-scarves coped with
multiple plastic shopping bags; men in grey suits and collared sweatshirts
traded goods and gossip while fingers fiddled the Names of Allah through
their worry beads; porters in striped shirts and voluminous dun-coloured
cotton pantaloons humped sacks of potatoes from the south on peddled head-bands
and leather-harnessed shoulders(29).
During his short stay in Istanbul for the 23rd Interpol Conference (September,
1955), Ian Fleming took some notes about the Turks which would later be
used in From Russia With Love (1955): ‘And as usual when Turks reach the
manic phase, their frustrations were just about to be released through
the one safety valve every patriotic Turk is born with - his hatred of
the Greeks’ (The Life of Ian Fleming, 363). He pictures his Turkish fellow
in the novel under the name of Darko Kerim ironically in a complete physical
distortion with 'his curling black hair, his crooked nose, and the face
of a vagabond soldier of fortune' (The Life of Ian Fleming, 368).
Discussing the anthropological traits of the Turks Paul Bowles begins
dismissively:
Faces range in type from Levantine through Slavic to Mongoloid, the
last belonging principally to the soldiers from eastern Anatolia. Apart
from language there seems to be no one element which they all have in common,
not even shabbiness, since there are usually, among the others, a few men
and women who do understand how to wear their clothing (Their Heads Are
Green, 56).
He then tries to establish a cultural image of a nation addicted to hashish
based on the curious religious argument that:
For Judaism and Christianity the means has always been alcohol; for
Islam it has been hashish. The first is dynamic in its effects, the other
static. If a nation wishes, however mistakenly, to westernise itself, first
let it give up hashish (Their Heads Are Green, 57).
The most effective representation of Turkey, which is clearly pointed
out at the very beginning of Diamonds Bid when Jonathan faces tough questioning
and witnesses the bribe at the police station in Ankara, is the corruption
of people:
They had their backs half to me and I watched one pulled out of his
pocket a large bundle of notes and handed it to the other who began to
count. There were a hundred of them, new 500 lira notes, say two thousand
pounds sterling(30).
From this specific incident at the police station, Rathbone generalises
the corruption of most Turkish officials through Jonathan who remarks that
'every foreigner in Turkey has his pet stories about bribery of officials;..and
many English teachers are offered expensive presents round about examination
time' (Diamonds Bid, 21).
The corruption image as a general line through his works is also repeated
with similar emphases later in Hand Out (1968). When the writer introduces
Nur Bey as an incorruptible person at the beginning of the book he tries
to draw a general picture of the corruption among the bureaucrats of the
country as well:
People in high positions had found that they could not bribe or blackmail
Nur Bey. He had been an embarrassment to perverted politicians, to businessmen
too rich to be bothered with even a smoke-screen of legality, and to generals
who saw nothing wrong in taking a commission from foreign armament manufacturers
for weapons(31).
In spite of the previous remarks describing Nur Bey as an honest character,
dedicated only to his moral responsibilities, Rathbone also implies on
the same page that he is also affected by the general trend of corruption
in his country: 'Yet Nur's integrity was not the icy incorruptibility of
a Protestant, public-school, senior civil servant. He put his family before
his countrymen, his countrymen before government expediency' (Hand Out,
20). Moreover, referring to the fact that Jonathan Smollett had been teaching
English to Nur's son Firat before he was allowed to leave Turkey with a
bag of diamonds he concludes that: 'He would not bribe the examiners, but
he would not feel he was doing anything wrong if he offered them favours
in return for favours received' (Hand Out, 20).
Apart from several general designations of Turkish people with cynical
connotations, some writers such as Dennis Wheatley and Barry Unsworth also
seem to create an individual Turkish cliché through historical figures
such as the Eunuch Kazdim, Prince Ali of The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935)
and Mahmoud Pasha of Pascali's Island (1980) in particular references to
their repulsive appearance and brutal behaviour. For example, in Unsworth's
characterisation, Mahmoud Pasha and his chief guard Izzet are reflected
in quite a humiliating way: ‘The Pasha enormously fat, almost immobile,
some clogging of breath in the depths of him, wheeze of depravity and avarice;
Izzet (his Jackal) delicate-boned, beaky, vigilant, like a well-groomed
vulture’(32). In another part of the novel, while Unsworth
mockingly criticises his hostility as a governor to the inhabitants of
the island, he caricatures the Turkish Pasha as untalented and stupid:
For Mahmoud Pasha to burden the peasants in order to acquire a grand
piano his thick fingers cannot play and his malformed ears cannot appreciate,
that is when harmony breaks down, in every sense of the word, that is the
discord impossible not to dwell on (Pascali's Island, 74).
Although some critics such as John Coates, suggest that 'the point here
is not a disdainful dismissal of Turks in themselves, but a comment on
the western European central impoverishment of which they are the image'(33),
it is possible to come across detrimental attributes to Turkey in The Towers
of Trebizond. While Rose Macaulay, as 'a woman of deep religious conviction'(34),
criticises Europeans for their disconnection with the past in terms of
moral and cultural values, she also tends to be critical of Turks by depicting
different characters in the book as indifferent and hostile to western
cultural values as Laurie comments in reference to Troy: 'Troy was our
ancestor, and the centre of a world that Turks could never know' (Towers,
38).
As far as the historic city of Troy is concerned, Macaulay seems to
criticise Turkish unawareness and lack of appreciation of the cultural
values of the city. As Laurie points out: 'Turks are not brought up, as
Europeans are (were) on the Trojan legend' (Towers, 31). John Coates tends
to back up this attitude:
Laurie knew the history of 'Trebizond' from the time of Jason, its
role of 'Queen of the Euxine and apple of the eye of all Asia.' For her
it is a Romance like Troy, Fonterrabia or Venice. Without a sense of the
beauty of the Christian past, by analogy, the mind has nothing to work
on in considering Christianity. Like the Turks who had not heard of it
and called it Trabzon and supposed it has always been a Turkish town" (Towers,
67-8).
Macaulay's complaints about the indifference of the Turks to classical
values is also backed up by her personal correspondence concerning Turkey.
So, for example, she describes a German couple she came across in Antioch
in a letter (Alexandretta, 25 June, 1954) to a friend named Jeanie: 'They
are, I think, the only people in Antioch who know anything about the antiquities
- Turks neither know nor care - so they were very useful' (Letters to a
Sister, 162).
Although she attributes a similar comment to another German she met
in Troy in another letter to Jeanie (Istanbul, l July, 1954), her complaints
about Turkish indifference sometimes turn into antipathy as she partly
agrees with what the German says about the Turks:
I had an interesting talk with a German this morning who has lived
in Turkey...for 17 years. He thinks Turks on the whole (as I do) the stupidest
people in the world, and not really belonging to Europe, which they drifted
into over the centuries from the eastern plains (Letters to a Sister, 166).
Although it is not felt as effectively as in other travel accounts such
as The Asiatics and In Xanadu: A Quest the stereotypical western interpretation
of Turkish history with its negative evocations is ironically emphasised
by Laurie in reference to Father Chantry-Pigg on a couple of occasions.
Once he disparages the people of Trebizond as a fierce race of nomadic,
bloodthirsty and rather stupid followers of the Prophet (Father Chantry-Pigg
looked on the followers of the Prophet with prejudice and distaste) who
had been most uncultured' (Towers, 76). On another occasion in the proceeding
pages, Laurie introduces Father Chantry-Pigg's historical evaluation of
the Turks in an ironic way:
Father Chantry-Pigg who had unfair anti-Turk prejudices, owing to his
devotion to Greeks and to the Trinity, said that Turkish hordes had
always made where they settled barren deserts only fit for camels, and
every few centuries they move on somewhere else and make more howling deserts...the
Sultans and Pashas and eunuchs and nobles and tycoons, have built palaces
and mosques and harems and castles and cities, out of the stones they take
from the Greeks and Roman cities and temples (Towers, 104).
Another common characteristic of travel accounts about Turkey is
the unfavourable depiction of people and different locations of the country.
Turks are usually featured as ugly, ignorant, smelly and lecherous, and
the cities as filthy, boring and full of beggars and dogs. When Krikor
warns the narrator about the Turks before he enters Turkey across the Syrian
border in In Xanadu, he introduces Turks with the most well-known negative
evocations, for example: 'Be careful with the Turks. They are bastards.
Evilmen. Bang! They kill. Rob money. Rape womens. Big problem' (In Xanadu,
58).
Remarking that 'I had forgotten how boring Turks could be' (In Xanadu,
62), William Dalrymple then describes a policeman he meets on the train
to Erzurum:
We sat in a compartment beside a suicidal policeman returning to his
posting in Erzurum after a holiday on the Aegean coast. His clothes were
dirty and unwashed, and three or four days' stubble covered his face; he
chain-smoked and spat on the floor. His mood reflected my own and I was
waffled to sleep by a long lullaby of his woes (In Xanadu, 109).
While the image of Turk as ignorant is painted through a Greek character,
Mascououlos, in Orient Express 'the Turks have not studied the Greek classics.
They are ignorant. They do not know Aristophanes or Homer or Demosthenes,
not even the deputies (Orient Express, 27). Philip Glazebrook seems to
ratify the perception of ignorance more or less with a similar interpretation
that:
as a race the Turks don't care a jot for preserving what is beautiful,
or even what is useful, they have the instinct (nomad's instinct?) for
making the best of what chance puts in their way to achieve a little comfort
in a stony place (Journey to Kars, 75).
Since the focal point of the book is the past of Turkey rather than the
present, Glazebrook's primary concern seems to be the anthropological background
of Turkish people. When he visits Konya, a historical middle Anatolian
city he criticises the distressing appearance of the city by seeing it
as a reflection of nomadic taste with some negative connotations:
Water and shade, not fine buildings, satisfy a nomad's needs, and I
believe that much of what has always distressed and surprised the European
in Turkey may be understood by accepting that the Turks are a nomadic race.
They are at heart nomads, and their country is subject to devastation by
earthquake; you have to take these two fundamental facts into account when
you look at a Turkish town and wonder why they don't seem to care that
it is so dreadfully ugly (Journey to Kars, 88).
Besides the use of the term "nomadic" in a similar context, when he notes
that 'an efficient, widespread, and cheap system of travel is, I'm sure,
as necessary to a nomadic people as water and shade' (Journey to Kars,
92), he also employs it in his negative evaluation of the people as restless
and indifferent: ‘The restlessness of Asiatics - their nomadic lack of
attachment, most obvious to a stranger in their indifference to buildings
- makes the settled peoples of Europe uneasy’ (Journey to Kars, 151).
Starting with the anthropological term "nomad", he criticises the nation,
taking it to be indifferent and unappreciative. In one example, to emphasise
the indifference of Turks to western values and civilisation he argues:
The race of Osman, after all, is not descended by blood or by culture
from the Greeks, as Europeans are, so it isn't surprising that Turks don't
instinctively revere classical remains. All the upper floors of the museum
were closed, as they had been the last time I was there three years before.
The building appears to be falling to pieces (Journey to Kars, 191).
Elsewhere, he makes a similar comment about the Turks being indifferent
and destructive to classical values:
Everything that the educated European valued - all that his civilisation
was based upon or had produced - was regarded by the impassive Turk with
indifference, and was allowed to become a heap of ruins. The Turkish language
contains no word meaning 'preservation'. Whatever fell into their hands
became 'the undrained marsh, the sand-choked river, the grass-grown market-place,
the deserted field, the crumbling fortress, the broken arch. Stagnation,
death-like stagnation, ever characterised the rule of the race of Othman.'
(Journey to Kars, 233-4).
He makes use of this popular image of indifference in a different context
to support his stereotypical perception of Eastern people or the “Asiatics”
as he calls them: 'It doesn't offend Asiatics, who possess no instinctive
reverence for old stones, having always sold them to foreigners, or burned
them for lime, thrown them down in the search for treasure' (Journey to
Kars, 50).
To sum up, the image of Turkey which had been built up by novels and
travel accounts since the Crusades, and was matured during the heyday of
the Ottoman Empire, was transformed into an image of self indulgence symbolised
by the Sublime Porte in the nineteenth century. It was then perpetuated
by new perceptions related, for example, to atrocities and became worldwide
owing to diffusion through the new means of communication. In addition,
those who visited Turkey to revere previous images as they had been imbued
with the past rather than the present state introduced their first impressions
which reinforce the stereotype although '"Johnny Turk isn't a bad chap."But
that has not prevented his being treated as one'(35).
NEXT
NOTES
1-Bernard Lewis, “Some English
Travellers in the East” in Middle Eastern Studies 4, 1967-8, p. 296. Further
reference to this work will be given after quotations in the texts, by
mentioning its shortened title, '“English Travellers”'.
2-’On October 4, 1883, the
highly publicised Orient Express made its inaugural run to Constantinople,
its two sleeping cars full of distinguished journalists, diplomats and
railway officials, and its dining car stocked with the vintage wine and
gourmet food which, long after it had been removed from the menu, people
would associate with the great train.
Though its route, 1800 miles, was much shorter than the Trans-Siberian's
6000, its romance remained undiminished until the Second World War. With
the exception of James Bond's trip in From Russia With Love, all Orient
Express fiction is set in the 'twenties and' thirties, beginning with Maurice
Dekobra's The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (1924) and including Graham
Greene's Stamboul Train, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express,
part of Eric Ambler's A Coffin For Dimitrios, and Ethel Lina White's The
Wheel Spins - this last became the Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes’.
See: Paul Theroux, Sunrise With Seamonsters (London: Penguin, 1986), p.182.
3-Norman Sherry, The Life
of Graham Greene (1904-1939) vol.1 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989), p. 408.
Further reference to this work will be given after quotations in the texts,
by mentioning its shortened title, 'Graham Greene'.
4-Paul Fussell, Abroad:
British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1980), p. 407. Further reference to this work will be given after
quotations in the texts, by mentioning its shortened title, 'Abroad'.
5-Elton Glaser, “The Self-Reflexive
Traveler: Paul Theroux on the Art of Travel and Travel Writing” in The
Centennial Review, vol. 33, 1989, p.196. Further reference to this work
will be given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning its shortened
title, '“The Self-Reflexive Traveler”'.
6-Paul Theroux, The Great
Railway Bazaar, Ist pub. 1975 (London: Penguin, 1977), p.166. Further reference
to this work will be given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning
its shortened title, 'Railway Bazaar'.
7-Paul Theroux, Sunrise
With Seamonsters (London: Penguin, 1986), p.184. Further reference to this
work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its shortened
title, 'Seamonsters'.
8-Stamboul Train was first
published by William Heinemann Ltd. in 1932, and in the United States of
America it was first published under the title Orient Express in 1933 by
Doubleday; it was later published by Penguin in 1963. Graham Greene, Stamboul
Train (London: Penguin, 1963-1975), p. 213. Further reference to this work
will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Stamboul
Train'.
9-Dennis Wheatley, The Eunuch
of Stamboul (London: Arrow Books, 1960), p.59. Further reference to this
work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title,
'The Eunuch of Stamboul'.
10-Agatha Christie, Murder
on the Orient Express (London: Fontana, 1956), p. 39. Further reference
to this work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning
its title, 'Murder on the Orient Express'.
11-Frederic Prokosch, The
Asiatics, 1st pub. 1935, (London: Robin Clark, 1991), p. 71. Further reference
to this work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning
its title, 'The Asiatics'.
12-’The city of Istanbul
has a triangular position; on the west is the land of Thrace, on the south
is the Sea of Marmara and to the northeast the wonderful, deep sea water
harbour called the Golden Horn. And Northwards from the tip of the city
runs the narrow thoroughfare of the Bosphorus, dividing Europe from Asia
and joining the Black Sea, fed by the great traffic-carrying rivers of
Russia, to the Sea of Marmara, and thence, through the historic narrows,
flanked by Gallipoli and Troy, to the Mediterranean and the world beyond’.
See: Michael Maclagan, The City of Constantinople (London: Thames and Hudson,
1968), p.13.
‘The city used to be called Constantinople-a name deriving from the
name of the Roman emperor, Constantine, the founder of the city. Constantinople
has been many things: the capital and centre of the East Roman or Byzantine
Empire for over a millennium, the head of a struggling Latin state for
five decades, the capital of the Turkish Sultanate for nearly five centuries.
To the Russians it was Tsarigrad the town of Caesar; the Norsemen and Varangians
named it Micklegarth. As the Ottoman dynasty declined politically-the city
became increasingly cosmopolitan.
How the name Istanbul arose for the imperial city is something of a
problem. The form Astanbul occurs as early as Ibn Batuta, writing Arabic
in 1350 or so. This makes less likely the widely accepted view that Istanbul
is a Turkish version of the Greek words 'in the city'(eis ten polin). In
the west the form Stamboul was current, but it is not easy for Turks to
pronounce two initial consonants; Istanbul is possibly therefore neither
more nor less than a failure to pronounce Constantinoupolis in all its
syllables. The hazards of the epithet 'Constantinopolitan' may account
for the popularity of 'Byzantine'.
During the nineteenth century the Great City and the Bosphorus figured
constantly in international politics because of Russian ambitions both
for Constantinople, the great cradle of the orthodox faith, and also for
an ice free access to her ports. In 1923 came the severest blow of all
for the city when the National Assembly decreed that henceforward Ankara
would be the capital of Turkey’. See: Michael Maclagan, The City of Constantinople
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), p. 146.
For more information, also see: David Talbot Rice, Constantinople: Byzantium
- Istanbul (London: 1965); J.A. Cuddon, The Owl's Watchsong: A Study of
Istanbul (London: 1960); N.M. Penzer, The Harem Revised ed. (London: 1966);
Robert Liddell, Byzantium and Istanbul (London: 1956);
13-Jan Morris, Among the
Cities (London: Penguin, 1986), p.196. Further reference to this work will
be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Among
the Cities'.
14-Leo Hamalian and Ara
Baliozian, “Hemingway in Istanbul” in Ararat, 1988 Spring vol. 29, p. 43.
Further reference to this work will be given after quotations in the text,
by mentioning its title, 'Ararat'.
15-Paul Bowles, Their Heads
Are Green (London: An Abacus Book, Peter Owen Publishers, 1990), p. 55.
Further reference to this work will be given after quotations in the text,
by mentioning its title, 'Their Heads Are Green'.
16-John Pearson, The Life
of Ian Fleming (London: Coronet Books, 1989), p. 363. Further reference
to this work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning
its title, 'The Life of Ian Fleming'.
17-John Dos Passos, Orient
Express, Ist pub. 1922 (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930),
pp. 12-3. Further reference to this work will be given after quotations
in the text, by mentioning its title, ‘Orient Express’.
18-Eric Ambler, Journey
Into Fear, (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1966), p.9. Further reference to
this work will be given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning its
title, 'Journey Into Fear'.
19-The writer has been
to Istanbul in 1978 and written a chapter about the city under the title
'City of Yok'. See Jan Morris, Among the Cities (London: Penguin, 1986).
20-David Dodge, Talking
Turkey (London: Arthur Barker, 1955 Ist pub.), pp. 151-2.
21-William Dalrymple, In
Xanadu: A Quest (London: Flamingo, 1990), pp. 101-2. Further reference
to this work will be given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning
its shortened title, 'In Xanadu'.
22-Philip Glazebrook, Journey
to Kars, Ist pub. 1984 (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 82. Further reference
to this work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning
its title, 'Journey to Kars'.
23-’Hotels are built, after
all, to make the tourist feel at home, and that, nowadays, means that the
home of the mass tourist and of the commercial traveller must be copied,
whereas, when the Pera Palas was built (or any of the magnificent monuments
to the belle epoque of hotel building), 'home' to a majority of visitors
was a Victorian country house - or, if it wasn't, they would have wanted
the hotelier to think it was. So, at the Pera Palas, once behind your mahogany
door off the long dim corridor, what you have is the bedroom of a Victorian
country house with an Edwardian bathroom added to it. When the porter had
gone, leaving me master of solemn wardrobes, and chests of drawers, of
plush curtains and Turkey rug, of broad white bed and comfortable white
space in the bathroom, peace entered my soul. Home at last!’ See: Philip
Glazebrook, Journey to Kars (London: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 175-6.
24-Rose Macaulay, The Towers
of Trebizond (London: Flamingo, 1990), p. 262. Further reference to this
work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its shortened
title, 'Towers'.
25-Constance Babington
Smith, ed. Last Letters to a Friend from Rose Macaulay (London: Collins,
1962), pp. 159-60. Further reference to this work will be given after quotations
in the texts, by mentioning its shortened title, 'Last Letters'
26-Constance Babington
Smith, ed. Letters to a Sister from Rose Macaulay (London: Collins, 1964),
p.162. Further reference to this work will be given after quotations in
the texts, by mentioning its shortened title, 'Letters to a Sister'.
27-Alice R. Bensen, Rose
Macaulay (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), pp.141-2. Further reference
to this work will be given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning
its title, ‘Rose Macaulay'.
28-Reeva S. Simon, The
Middle East in Crime Fiction (New York: Lilian Barber Press, 1989), p.85.
29-Julian Rathbone, Pandora
Option, Ist pub. 1990 (London: Mandarin, 1991), p. 1. Further reference
to this work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning
its title, 'Pandora Option'.
30-Julian Rathbone, Diamonds
Bid (London: Joseph, 1967), p. 14. Further reference to this work will
be given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning its title, 'Diamonds
Bid'.
31-Julian Rathbone, Hand
Out (London: Joseph, 1968), p. 20. Further reference to this work will
be given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning its title, 'Hand
Out'.
32-Barry Unsworth, Pascali's
Island (London: Penguin, 1980), p.55. Further reference to this work will
be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Pascali's
Island'.
33-John Coates, “Metaphor
and Meaning in The Towers of Trebizond”, in Durham University Journal 80
(1987) 111-121 (p.114). Further reference to this work will be given after
quotations in the texts, by mentioning its shortened title, '“Metaphor
and Meaning”’.
34-J.V. Guerinot, “The
Pleasures of Rose Macaulay” in Twentieth Century Literature, 33 (Spring
1989), 110-128 (p.119). Further reference to this work will be given after
quotations in the texts, by mentioning its shortened title, '“The Pleasures”'.
35-Clement Attlee remarked
after fighting at Gallipoli. Noted in Frederic Raphael, “Empire Building”
in The Sunday Times (5 December, 1993), p. 5.