On the Shores of the Mediterranean (22 page)

Inside the 4000-yard western entrance, the Straits begin to widen out until, five miles inside, between Erenkeui Bay, which lies below the beautiful wooded hills on the Asian side, and the much more barren, steep-sided, scrub-covered hills on the Gallipoli peninsula, four and a half miles of water separates the two. Then they begin to contract again until at the Narrows, thirteen miles inside, only 1600 yards separate Europe from Asia. It was here that the Greeks under Alcibiades defeated the Spartans off Cynossema on the European side, the place where Hecuba, wife of King Priam, is buried. She was turned into a dog for blinding the murderer of her son, Polydorus, and also for killing his three sons. She was also the mother of Hector and eighteen other of Priam’s sons, including Paris.

Here at the Narrows, in 1452, the year before he took Constantinople, Mehmed II, the Conqueror, built the two castles of the Dardanelles, the Boghaz-hisarlari, on the European side close to Hecuba’s tomb, and on the Asian side the Chanak-kilesi, which took its name from Chanak, now Cannakale, a town a little upstream which was originally founded by the Genoese and where, until comparatively recently, a very attractive rough sort of pottery was made.

It was these two inner forts, with heavy German guns mounted in them, that on 18 March 1915, in spite of being continuously shelled by battleships of the British and French fleets with shells of up to 15-inch calibre, were, although severely damaged, never put completely out of action.

Further up the Hellespont from Cannakale, in May 480 BC, Xerxes, the Persian, looked down from the heights above the Narrows at Abydos on the Asian side on his army crossing over to the European shore between Sestos and Madyos by a bridge of boats, reflecting gloomily as they did so on the transience of human life.

Here, too, a century and a half later, in 334 BC, while Alexander was offering sacrifices and libations at the mouth of the Hellespont, his army under Parmenio crossed it into Asia from Sestos to Abydos, using merchant ships and 160 triremes. What a sight these two crossings of the Straits must have been. Here, too, at some unknown date, Leander drowned while swimming to a rendezvous with his lover, Hero, whose temple of Aphrodite of which she was the high priestess was in the wooded groves above Sestos, woods that are there still; a difficult feat which Byron, on his way to Constantinople and wind-bound at the Narrows in a frigate, performed without coming to grief. He crossed in the opposite direction, from Europe to Asia, as did a number of officers of the Royal Navy and a Jewish gentleman.

Further in still, at the mouth of the Aegospotamos, a now unimportant rivulet on the European shore, Lysander and the Spartans destroyed the Athenian fleet of Conon and Pericles, after which Athens capitulated, thus ending, in 405 BC, the Peloponnesian War which lasted twenty-seven years, the one which Thucydides, its historian, described as ‘a disturbance’.

And all along the wooded Asian shore of the Straits, between its mouth and the Narrows, there are yet more of the ancient dead, soldiers and sailors less well known than Achilles or Patroclus, as well as the more peaceable inhabitants of cities of which the largest visible remains are often those fragments of marble and pot sherds lying in a field, long-lost cities of the ancient plain, Rhoetum, Ophrynium, on the brow of a hill, where a grove to Hector once stood, Dardanos on the heights near Point Kepez where the Narrows begin, and where, in the 1870s, the Turks, a people who make things last, mounted a forty-ton Krupp gun to replace the muzzle loaders, cast in brass and bronze and firing stone projectiles, that had defended the Straits since the fifteenth century.

And beyond this Asian shore of the Hellespont, now at this
hour of the afternoon with a dusty, golden haze hanging over it, was the Plain itself in which from 1871 to 1873 Heinrich Schliemann, together with his young Greek wife, Sofia Engastromanos, whom he had married for her supposed resemblance to Helen of Troy – she was certainly strikingly beautiful – laboured in often atrocious conditions on the mound of Hisarlik with their work force in search of Homer’s Troy, and where together they discovered in astonishing if not downright mysterious circumstances the wonderful gold hoard of the third millennium, deep down in what he thought was the city of King Priam.

The sun was setting now beyond Imbros, bathing the Cape and the peninsula in a brilliant light, accentuating the redness of the earth from which the spring rains of 1916 had washed away the last traces of the blood which for eight and a half months it had soaked up like some gigantic sponge.

In the whole of this extensive landscape the only living things besides ourselves, some seabirds hanging on the wind and the driver, who had long since finished polishing his taxi and had fallen asleep inside it, exasperated by these foreigners who stood for hours studying books and maps, some of which blew away, sending them chasing after them through the fields, was a large, unmartial-looking Turk swathed in what appeared to be a number of kilim rugs and mounted on a small donkey which he was urging from west to east across the tip of the peninsula over what had been a battlefield.

He was so large and the donkey was so small that beneath him and his kilims the donkey’s body was completely invisible and one was left with the impression of a Turk with four legs trotting across country from the Aegean Sea to the Dardanelles and urging himself onwards by beating himself with a stick.

We woke the driver and without a word he drove us away towards Istanbul through the sheltered lanes of what had been
the village of Krithia, which was now called Alcitepe, where in the gloaming children played happily together outside the whitewashed houses in the dust: leaving the young men of 1915–16 to be remembered by memorials or else in their noble, lovingly-tended cemeteries under the friendly trees, in which the sighing of the wind, apart from the sea murmuring upon the beaches, is often the only sound to be heard on this now otherwise almost forgotten peninsula; leaving them among the wild anemones, the carpets of pale pink cistus, the rosemary, the pink oleanders, the yellow flowering santolina, the irises and the purple heather. Soon it was quite dark.

What would they have found, the young men of 1915 who wrote ‘To Constantinople and the Harems’ and ‘Turkish Delight’ on the sides of the troop ships in Mudros Bay on Lemnos before sailing for Gallipoli, if by good fortune Colonel Mustafa Kemal and his Nineteenth Division had failed to hold the heights at Chunuk Bair on that April Sunday morning, and they had actually entered the city?

They would have found themselves in the capital of a decrepit, dying empire, still, perhaps, apart from Peking, the most interesting and mysterious of the great cities of the world and one from which, although still incomparable as a distant prospect, as it is to this day, much of the beauty had already long since melted away.

What they would have wanted to see and do, the young men of 1915, was what every visitor wanted to see and do, not only soldiers and sailors (and some did get there when Turkey capitulated and the Allied fleet anchored in the Bosphorus in the autumn of 1918): to see a harem on a grand scale and the bazaars, and to have a Turkish bath.

A Turkish bath is something that is becoming increasingly difficult to find in Britain, most of them having been knocked down and replaced by the sauna, which is about as much fun as being buried alive in a red-hot cigar box. In London you can still have a Turkish bath if you are a member of the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, which is not the same thing as being a motorist member of the RAC. If you are a woman, or look sufficiently like one, you can use the sumptuous ladies’ bath at the Dorchester.

No one, not even the proprietors, who presumably have some kind of trade association, seems quite sure how many
hamams
there are in Istanbul, but according to the proprietor of the beautiful Çinili Hamami, the Tiled Bath near the Aqueduct of Valens, there are more than a hundred old Ottoman baths, of which something like eighty are in use. Only the wealthiest ever had their own
hamams
. Often they were and still are adjacent to mosques, and because the great majority of the inhabitants are without showers in their houses, dislike bathing in standing water and are a cleanly people, the
hamam
is an institution that is unlikely to die out. As the Reverend Robert Walsh, Chaplain to the British Embassy at the Sublime Porte, the slightly risqué Irish author of
Constantinople and the Seven Churches of Asia
, wrote of the Turks in the 1930s, quoting an unnamed authority, ‘they hold impurity of the body in greater detestation than impurity of the mind, ablution being so essential that without it prayer will be of no value in the eyes of God’. ‘The Law enumerates
eleven occurrences’
, he went on, failing to enumerate them, ‘after which
a person must wash, some of which are exceedingly curious but not fit for the public eye’. At the time when he was writing, and long after it, marriage contracts included a provision that the husband had to give his wife bath-money. If he failed to do so, all she had to do was to go before a
cadi
, a Muslim judge, and turn her slipper upside down. If the husband still failed to produce the necessary admittance money, it was a ground for divorce.

Let us enter a
hamam
. In this case the Çinili Hamami, built for the famous Turkish corsair Barbarossa Hayrettin Paşa by the great mosque architect Sinan around 1545. It stands in a street high above Atatürk Bulvari, a sort of super highway that cuts through the old city from the Atatürk Bridge over the Golden Horn, goes under the Aqueduct of Valens and, if you continue along it until it becomes Mustafa Kemal Caddesi, and you don’t put your brakes on, deposits you in the Sea of Marmara.

The form of Çinili Hamami and most other
hamams
is based on that of a Roman bath, but as comparatively few readers have probably ever had a Roman bath it may perhaps be permitted to describe it. Going in through the swing doors one finds oneself in the
camekân
, a large, square, very lofty, domed, rather dim reception room, partly surrounded by a raised platform on which bathers leave their clothes and rest after the bath and with galleries with private rest rooms leading off them. In the middle of the room there is a beautiful marble fountain with, when I was there, goldfish swimming around it. Here, too, are piles of towels (the consumption of towels is prodigious), the reception desk where you deposit your valuables with the custodian, the tariff displayed over it, apparatus for tea-making, soft drinks and a band of attendants,
tellahs
, none of whom speak a word of English, all of whom are hoping that you are going to have something which most Turks don’t have because of the cost, a nice expensive
masaj
at about 300 Turkish lira which is really a gift to foreigners with the
pound sterling ($1.40) at around this figure. The prices are more or less the same in the majority of
hamams
off the tourist route, such as this one. The bath (the
banyo
) costs 175 TL, soap is sometimes an extra, some people bring their own. What is called
kese
, a rub down with a rough mitten which peels off layers of old skin which looks like grey dough, costs 40 TL, is well worth having and follows the
masaj
if you have it. If you have the lot you would be expected to give a collective tip amounting to about 200 TL.

Now the
tellah
, when he judges you to be in a dangerously near state of complete undress, hands you two thin, striped towels called
pestemal
, in one of which you gird your loins. The trick is to do this without exposing yourself. You are not in the bath house of a rugger club on a Saturday afternoon, and Turkish gentlemen are not only not interested in what you have brought from the West, they are actively interested in not seeing it.

You are then given a pair of
nalin
, wooden pattens on which it is very easy to skid, and propelled through a door into what is called the
soğukluk
, which is little more than a corridor with a little dome at either end, the equivalent of a Roman
tepidarium
, the purpose of which is to keep out the cold air in the
camekân
and keep the hot air in the steam room which leads off it. In most
hamams
, the lavatories lead off the
soğukluk
and as most of them were installed back in the sixteenth century this is no place to linger. In the worst sort of
hamam
their presence can make itself known throughout the entire edifice.

The next and final door leads into the
hararat
, the steam room, vast and cruciform, lined with pale grey marble in this case decorated with panels of tiles, with a central dome supported by columns and other smaller domes in the side chambers and niches in the walls, each of which is furnished with a beautiful marble basin filled with elegant brass hot and cold water taps. The domes
have perforations in them filled with inverted hemispheres of glass to admit the light, and when the sun is overhead this steam-filled chamber is illuminated by long parallel shafts of light which reach down into it and produce an unearthly and pleasing radiance.

In the middle of it is the
göbek taşi
, the navel or belly stone, the hottest part, a raised marble slab with the furnace beneath it. On it, according to the time of day – business is brisk in the evenings and on holidays – ten to a dozen Turkish gentlemen may be lying, one or two of whom may speak some German, some of whom may be discussing
futbol
with as much animation as anyone can muster in an atmosphere with the consistency of hot porridge. Others will be reclining, semi-comatose. Those covered with a curious mixture intended to remove superfluous hair should be given a wide berth. Singing is forbidden.

After half an hour you will begin to sweat prodigiously. After an hour you will probably have had enough and if you have contracted for a
masaj
will be approached by an attendant who will seize you, pin you to the ground and begin to knead you and twist your limbs with a variety of excruciating and crafty locks. This is followed by the
kese
and by soaping and washing, the attendant using a bowl called a
hamam taşi
to scoop the water out of the basins. All the time the bather is covered, but if he is washing himself and wants to reach the parts the attendant doesn’t want to, he hangs the other towel with which he was provided over the entrance to the sluicing place as a sign that he is engaged in attending to himself. The ceremony is over. Swathed in fluffy towels from Bursa in places of the better sort, the bather is led away to recover in the
camekân
, either on the public benches or else in one of the
cabinets privés
.

The entrance to the ladies’ bath, if there is one, is always separate, usually round the corner. In the Çinili Hamami the facilities are identical. In some
hamams
they are smaller. In others ladies
have access to the gentlemen’s baths at certain hours. Some have no facilities for ladies at all. The penalty for a man straying, even by mistake, into a ladies’ bath used to be death.

According to her, the ladies’ baths visited by Wanda, an indefatigable investigator (four baths in three days and a rigorous inspection of the rest), were much more jolly than the gentlemen’s, a female version of White’s Club without the booze, as opposed to the ones I bathed in, which were more like the Athenaeum without the bishops. Everyone was kind to her, both attendants and bathing ladies being fascinated by her pallor, taking her for a Circassian slave escaped from a harem. There was a lot of singing and laughter and scurrilous gossip in the women’s baths and in all of them small children raced around naked like miniature streakers. Everyone else wore briefs – ladies should take a pair with them – but there seemed to be far less
pudeur
than in the men’s department; and in one bath she was massaged by a lady with wildly swinging bosoms, but much less violently than I was by her male counterparts. She gave her masseuse 700 TL for the whole treatment which included the tip, and as the masseuse constituted the entire staff she was delighted.

Outside the snow that had been falling turned to rain, cold, hard winter rain, streaming down over the city from the direction of the Black Sea, and what had been snow turned into a hideous slush underfoot. The proprietors of the stalls in the Sahaflar Çarşisi, the Market of the Second-hand Booksellers, hastily covered their stocks of germ-laden paperbacks and the more sumptuous books of Islamic devotion with plastic sheets and took themselves off through the Gate of the Spoon-makers to the nearest tea house, which until quite recently sheltered under an enormous plane tree, known as the Tree of Idleness, close to the Beyazit Mosque.

This market occupies a very attractive courtyard full of vines
and trees, nicer still in summer, and it is one of the oldest markets in the city. It stands on the site of the Chartoprateia, the Book and Paper Market, which flourished when the city was Byzantium.

One of the best places to be in Istanbul in winter when it rains, apart from being in a Turkish bath, is inside the Kapali Çarşisi, the Great Covered Bazaar. The easiest way to get to it from the Book and Paper Market is to leave it by the Hakkakalar Kapisi, the Gate of the Engravers, and cross Cadirçilar Caddesi, the Street of the Tent-makers, which is lined with booths occupied by tin-and copper-smiths and is perpetually blocked by people and vehicles loading and unloading. This is a very interesting street. No one makes tents there any more but any one of the owners of the booths in it will sell you old brass and iron objects, or make you a fine tin stove or an oven for your house, or run you up a copper finial for a minaret in rather less time than it takes to get a plumber to call back home. You cross this street and go through the Gate of the Fez-makers, Fesçilar Kapisi, into the shallow, uphill end of the Kapali Çarşisi.

The difficulty that most travellers experience when visiting the bazaar is the absence of a plan of it which gives any idea of its layout or the orientation of its streets, except an excellent guide book,
Strolling Through Istanbul
, by Hilary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely; but, unfortunately, this doesn’t give the names of the streets in Turkish and their English equivalents, which would be a godsend. There
is
the Bazaar Committee’s own plan,
Der Amtlicher Plan Des Grossen Basars in Istanbul
, but this is in German. It is also a security document and unless you have special permission to study it, you might well find yourself with half a dozen of the bazaar police dogs at your throat. Even Karl Baedeker, King of Plan-Providers, failed his readers when it came to the Covered Bazaar. Having funked this vital task, he gave them some pretty feeble advice in what was to be the first and last edition of his
Konstantinopel und das Westliche Kleinasien
, published in 1914, which was either to hire themselves a dragoman or else to furnish themselves with magnetic compasses for use in the maze of lanes,
‘das Gewirr von Gassen’
.

The whole Covered Bazaar is contained in a rectangle measuring 1280 feet from north to south and 1760 feet from east to west, an area of 51.7 acres. However, this area includes a number of
hans
, caravanserais for the reception of caravans, their goods and animals, some of which have doors opening into the Bazaar, some of them extremely picturesque although in an extremity of decay. If these parts are deducted, there can be no precise figure, the total area reduces itself to about 48 acres, with which Hachette’s agreeably austere
Guide Bleu Turquie
concurs.

Today the number of shops is around 2875 and they employ some 30,000 people, 4000 shops if those in the surrounding
hans
, which no longer serve as
hans
, are included. Altogether there are sixty-six named streets and lesser ways (
sokaks
) in the Bazaar, although I myself have not been able to identify more than forty-seven. Their total length amounts to about 5 miles. All this information is kindly furnished by the Çarşi Esnaf Dernegi, the Bazaar Management Committee, with whom anyone is welcome to argue if they feel so inclined. This was back in 1975, when I began carrying out these investigations.