Let Our Fame Be Great (17 page)

Even those few Circassians still fighting were giving up hope. De Fonvielle desperately dreamed of a hundred or so European troops to hold the Russians off, and to allow the Circassians to rally and return to the offensive. But they did not come. ‘The highlanders were dying of cold, abandoning their posts and leaving just a few people to watch the enemy, and if it had not been winter, which interfered with our communications but also with those of the Russians, the country could not have been held. Every day the territory that we held shrunk more and more, the Russians, albeit slowly, moved ever forward, and it was obvious that with the first good days we would be finally defeated.'

In the circumstances, further resistance was pointless. They decided to leave to avoid falling into the hands of the Russians. And it is at this point that de Fonvielle's description became invaluable. His is the only extant description of the conditions in Circassia at this time, and he is the only man who described the panic that overcame the nation as it prepared to leave en masse for Turkey.

Ships were sailing from Turkey to the Circassian shore in relays, and would fill up with Circassians and leave again immediately, their
owners desperate to make as much money – or slaves, for some refugees were reduced to paying for the voyage with their children – as they could from this never-to-be-repeated opportunity. A boat that usually held fifty or sixty people, de Fonvielle said, now held as many as 400. These refugees had just a few handfuls of grain and some water to sustain them for the week's journey on the open sea. Returning sailors described the horrors of seeing passengers thrown overboard, of half of the passengers of some ships dying, and of fights between the crews and the Circassians, but the refugees would not be put off. They did not even build shacks on the shore to wait in. They just sat and huddled in the snow and wind, fixated on building a better life over the sea.

Here de Fonvielle was in luck, for a boat arrived captained by a man he had met before. And this Yakub gave him a place that night. Only when morning came was he able to see that 347 people were packed aboard, with so little space on deck that the crew had to walk on the passengers' heads to get to their places.

The voyage was desperately uncomfortable, made more uncomfortable for the Frenchman by the Circassians' resolve to throw him overboard if a Russian warship came close. And then people started to die. On the second day, the bodies of two women and a child were thrown overboard. On the third day, two men and a woman followed them. On the fourth day, fifteen people died. It is hard to imagine the delight with which this cargo of the living dead saw the shore on the fifth day, their water having finished two days before.

‘If we had remained for another forty-eight hours on board, then probably more than half of the passengers would have died, before we got into Trabzon,' de Fonvielle said.

The Circassians praised Allah when they saw the shore, and de Fonvielle recognized with pleasure the ruined fort of Akchakale, which he had seen a few months before. The fort juts out of the coast to the west of Trabzon (the Trebizond of the ancients), and was one of two designated settlement sites for refugees near the town. When de Fonvielle had last seen it, the fort was deserted save for a few fishing huts. Now, it was thronged. Smoke rose into the sky and, as they sailed closer, they heard the sounds of the mourning songs. The camp
was full, and twelve other ships were offshore, already unloading their cargoes of Circassians onto the beach.

What de Fonvielle was witnessing, terrible though it appears from his description, was just a fraction of a human catastrophe on a biblical scale. Foreign newspapers began to refer to it as an ‘exodus', as if no other word could do justice to its horrors.

The first accounts of the disaster that appear in the Foreign Office file that also contained the Circassians' petition are dated February 1864. This must have been before de Fonvielle's arrival at Akchakale, since a mere 3,000 refugees were based there, but already the situation was desperate.

‘The quarters in the vicinity of the cemeteries are rendered uninhabitable owing to the careless manner in which the dead are buried, and the offensive consequences thereof; and whole families have abandoned their dwellings. The chief aqueduct which feeds the fountains of the town is tainted, a Circassian corpse having been found floating therein,' wrote a consul called Stevens in Trabzon.

By May, Stevens was writing that 25,000 people were encamped at Akchakale and at a second camp at Saradere, with 120 – 150 people dying every day. So far, the writers managed to retain their distant gentlemen's club style. But on 20 May came another letter, this one misshaped like that of the Circassians, which like their petition shatters the atmosphere of polite boredom. In Samsun, a town further along the coast to the west, the situation was even worse.

‘Everywhere you meet with the sick, the dying, and the dead; on the threshold of gates in front of shops, in the middle of streets, in the squares, in the gardens, at the foot of trees. Every dwelling, every corner of the streets, every spot occupied by the immigrants, has become a hotbed of infection. A warehouse on the sea-side, a few steps distant from the quarantine-office, hardly affording space enough for 30 persons, enclosed till the day before yesterday 207 individuals, all sick or dying. I undertook to empty this hotbed of pestilence. Even the porters refused to venture in the interior of this horrible hole, out of which, assisted by my worthy colleague Ali Effendy, I drew several corpses in a state of putrefaction,' says the little letter written by the Medical Inspector of the Ottoman Empire, one Barozzi.

‘The encampment presents a picture hardly less revolting. From 40 to 50 thousand individuals in the most absolute destitution, preyed upon by diseases, decimated by death, are cast there without shelter, without bread and without sepulture. Here, I will stop, for great as is the confidence you honour me with, a complete description of this unqualified misery might seem to you overcharged.'

By this stage, the press was beginning to pick up on the catastrophe, with regular updates in the London
Times
, despite the news distraction of the American Civil War. And stories came in from Inebolu, and then from Varna, to show that the situation in Trabzon and in Samsun was repeated all round the Black Sea coast.

An account in the Liverpool
Mercury
on 25 June showed conditions in Varna, which is now in Bulgaria but was then an Ottoman port, were every bit as terrible as in Samsun. Steamers had dumped the refugees on the shore, leaving them to live in the open air, and smallpox was rife. ‘They say, “We all have had it, or have it now”, and I can answer for the truth of this, for nearly every man, woman, and child is marked, and in hundreds the face and hands are quite raw with it. Since I have been here (three weeks) 300 at the lowest estimate have been buried in the sands outside the town. They all say they died of cold. We have had much rain, especially at night, and these poor wretches have had to sleep out in it with nothing to cover them but their ordinary clothes, consisting only – in the case of the women – of a sort of long dressing gown and a pair of trousers. After one of these nights the dead lie thick on the ground, the others longing, I should think, to follow them,' the letter said.

It took the Ottoman Empire several months to organize its response to the crisis, although even that was inadequate. The captain of a ship carrying Circassians to Cyprus was so brutal that the passengers revolted, causing him to have many killed and thrown overboard. Of the 2,346 embarked, only 1,362 arrived at Larnaca, while other ships reported seeing bodies in the sea off Rhodes. Circassians in Anatolia revolted too, and the slave markets were flooded with the victims.

By September, Stevens wrote from Trabzon that most refugees had now been moved from the town and from Samsun, having left 100,000 bodies in the hastily dug cemeteries.

A visitor today would never know now that Akchakale had once been a refugee camp. The fort that de Fonvielle saw from the sea is still there, with a scattering of houses and a mosque on the slopes behind and around it. But there is no monument, no organized cemetery, and no Circassian population. On the two days I was in the village, one of the beaches where the Circassians landed was dotted with white sun loungers, but there was no sun and no one to lounge on them.

I hunted local people to tell me about the events, assuming that a disaster of such proportions would have been passed down in local folklore, but was amazed to be greeted by looks of blank disbelief. A group of middle-aged men by the beach looked at me as if I was mad when I questioned them about Circassian cemeteries, while children had no idea what I was talking about.

Eventually, my translator and I sat down by the mosque to drink one of the Turks' tulip-shaped glasses of tea before heading back to Trabzon. As we sat and talked in English, a small crowd gathered to stare at us curiously and wonder what we were doing in their village. I kept being brought fresh glasses of tea, and kept explaining my interest in the Circassians. It was at this point I met Ali Kurt, aged eighty, who sat down at our table, fixed his dark eyes on me and began to talk as if he had been waiting for us to come his whole life.

‘When I was a boy, we were planting nut trees and we found these bones you are talking about. These Circassians came here before I was born, they died of typhus, and they are buried on the hill,' he said, delighted by his audience of astounded fellow villagers, none of whom seemed to have heard the story before.

‘It was a huge catastrophe. If you dig down just fifty centimetres you will find bones, like sand on the seashore, there are so many.'

He summoned his neighbour, and we drove jolting up a rough track that ran under the coastal highway, and onto the hills that tower above the village. Within minutes, we were looking straight down onto the mosque's minarets and the thin coastal strip where de Fonvielle arrived in 1864. After ten minutes or so, we came to the hamlet of Teke, which was not marked on my map, but which was the last resting place for many of the poor refugees of 1864.

A man with a white beard and a flat cap had joined us. He also remembered finding bones in this orchard when he was a boy, although now there was nothing to distinguish it from any other field in the vicinity, except perhaps for the lush exuberance of its hazel trees.

‘I found a skull with gold teeth,' announced Ali Kurt, in a sudden upheaval of memory, before turning quiet when I asked what he had done with it. After a moment's pause, he admitted he and his father had thrown all the bones into the sea. He expected me to criticize him, I think (‘What could we do?' he asked. ‘There were too many of them'), but I understood.

Just the day before, I had walked along the base of the cliffs below the castle and found a small cache of bones in a crack in the rock. One appeared to be part of a pelvis, while another was half of a jawbone. I wondered about taking them back to the Caucasus with me and burying them, but in the end I too succumbed to the temptation for the quicker route, muttered a prayer or two, and threw them to the north, towards Circassia, and watched them vanish under water.

De Fonvielle landed on these rocks, probably 200 or so metres to the east of the fort, after his terrifying voyage. He buried his face in a stream that still skirts the base of the rock, although now it is choked with plastic bottles and old car tyres, and drank his fill. He had not eaten or drunk for two days and was weak with hunger, and was desperately relieved to be off the boat.

But he quickly discovered that he had celebrated too early. The Turks feared the epidemic diseases the Circassians had brought with them, and had ringed the camps with guards to stop the emigrants from escaping and infecting other areas. The situation was desperate. The refugees were sheltering under olive trees, with no houses or tents. They had almost no food, and they received rations from the government that were barely enough to live on. De Fonvielle watched as three boats loaded with bread came to the shore to feed the Circassians, but their loads were sufficient for just half of the crowd, and most of the Circassians were forced to go hungry for another day.

De Fonvielle decided he had to escape from this lethal encampment, where funerals filled the evenings of every day. ‘Four men
carried the dead on their shoulders and the family followed; the women went a little way behind, letting out terrible cries. This is called bewailing the dead. I heard this crying in the Caucasus, but in Akchakale there were so many dead people, that these concerts became intolerable.'

He searched the camp from one end to the other, until he finally found an old rogue called Akhmed relaxing in a shed. Akhmed boasted of a ship faster than any coastguard in the Black Sea and promised to take him to Trabzon.

At this point, de Fonvielle's wicked sense of black humour, perhaps unsurprisingly, appears to fail him. According to the text of his story, which I found in pamphlet form in a bookshop in the Caucasus town of Maikop and which was published by a Circassian firm, he wrote: ‘You know they were my friends, my comrades-in-arms, but at the same time I knew that they were doomed to certain death; this thought tormented me, particularly since I knew I could do nothing to assist them.'

The ending surprised me, since it was so out of character. I would have expected a last rapier-thrust of wit to defuse the horror of his story. A de Fonvielle who gave in to gloom at this stage was not one who would have noticed the details he recorded earlier on his trip.

It was, therefore, with a sense of relief that I found a second edition of the essay: this time published as a pamphlet in Ukraine, and which had a distinctly different last paragraph. In this un-bowdlerized version, his tale ends thus:

‘Slowly the cries of the Circassians were lost in the distance, and soon I could see only the red specks of their fires. Despite all the joy I felt, my heart was full of sorrow when I remember the terrible destitution of these unfortunates, whose hospitality I had enjoyed and whom I was now leaving, maybe for ever. The old smuggler was unmoved; nothing that happened around him disturbed him in any way . . .