Speaking of the Turks

by bey K. Ziya Mufti-zada

A visit in such a congenial atmosphere ends always too soon even if it has extended over two weeks. But I wanted my wife to know our cousins who lived on the Bosphorus, to whom we had already announced our coming, and I wanted her to come in close touch with the different aspects of home life in Turkey, to see the Turks from different angles. So we had to tear ourselves from Erenkeuy, after exchanging repeated promises of seeing each other soon and often in town, promises which—needless to say—were kept faithfully on both sides.

In the strict sense of the word our cousins are not really cousins of ours and would not even count as relations in western countries. However, as I said before, family bonds are so strong in Turkey, the clan spirit is so developed, that we call cousins even the nephews of our aunts by marriage. We consider them as such and we are brought up to feel toward them as such.

Our cousins live on the European side of the Bosphorus, at Emirghian, about half-way between the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea, in one of those old houses built right on the edge of the water. Theirs is one of the few remaining typically Turkish country houses on the Bosphorus, most of the others have either been destroyed by fire, fallen in ruins, or else been replaced by modern structures—villas, apartment houses, warehouses and depots which have, alas, contaminated with their ultra-modern and commercial appearance the otherwise smilingly passive shores of the Bosphorus. Thus this waterway, unique in the world, this natural canal between two seas, which winds its way in graceful curves between the green hills of two continents, offers now the sad spectacle of charred ruins—where a few tumbling walls blackened by fire are all that is left of the beautiful estates which adorned it but a few years ago—with here and there a few pretentious buildings whose showy architecture is a patent proof of the rapidity with which their owners have accumulated wealth during the war and post-war profiteering period. Worst of all, the lower Bosphorus is now bristling with quite a few high apartment houses peopled with chattering and noisy Levantines. Such apartment houses, with their tenants, are as out of place on the wonderful shores of this peerless waterway as the corrugated roofs and asbestos walls of the coal depots and general merchandising warehouses, hastily erected in recent years under the guidance of interested—if inartistic—foreign business men.

All the way to Emirghian I gave thanks to the Almighty for having protected at least a few imperial palaces and a few old estates which could still give an idea of what the Bosphorus looked like before the war. A few, low, rambling buildings of one or, at the most, two floors, growing lengthwise instead of upward, without a thought of economizing the land, surrounded with parks where grow old trees, are happily still left as a living proof of past splendour and good taste, and complete disregard of business advantages.

Our cousin's house is one of them, possibly a little more dilapidated, a little less comfortable than most of the other surviving buildings, as it has been for a very long time deprived of the yearly repairs that so large a house always needs. But what do we care: within the walls of its almost limitless entrance hall, on the wide steps of its gorgeously curved classical stairways, behind the latticed windows of its immense rooms, the hospitality we find is as sincere and as great as the one extended generations ago by one of the most brilliant Grand Vezirs of Turkey, who was then the head of the family, at a time when to be the Grand Vezir of Turkey really meant all the splendour that the world suggests.

Our hostess is a widow who speaks French so fluently that she would be taken for a French woman if she did not have the graceful poise and dignity so typical of Turkish women. Her husband filled a most important position in the Imperial palace in the time of the late Sultan, and was one of the most accomplished men I have ever met anywhere. Besides being a distinguished diplomat he was an art connoisseur and had accumulated a priceless collection of antique pictures, porcelains, carpets and books. Alas, this collection was destroyed a few years ago when their town house fell the victim of one of those all-destroying fires characteristic of Constantinople. Only a few of the secondary pieces of the collection which were left in their country house on the Bosphorus can still be seen there and are an attestation of what the collection used to be. To cap it all, the collection was insured in pre-war days in Turkish pounds which at that time had a gold value, and the fire having taken place during the war, and insurance being paid after the armistice, the family could only collect Turkish paper pounds. Thus, besides the irreparable moral loss, they had to suffer a very large material loss by recovering only one seventh of the value the collection was insured originally for. This is another example among millions of the terrible losses suffered in the last years by the Turks for reasons absolutely outside their control. It is a wonder that, despite all, they keep their composure and their dignity. Calm before the most unimaginable trials, keeping a firm front through the worst calamities, never complaining, never discouraged, never losing faith—truly the Turkish race is the most stoical of all.

Our young host, the only son of the family, is just on a leave from Germany where he went during the war to finish his studies and where he has remained since then, having obtained a leading position in one of the largest electrical engineering enterprises in Germany. His mother is justly proud of the success of her son and we frankly rejoice with her that one of us, a pure Turk in all respects, has evidently acquired such a complete technical knowledge and has shown so much capacity as to be picked out to fill a responsible position in one of the leading firms of a country known the world over for the technical ability of its electrical engineers. We ask Kemal to tell us his experiences in Germany, but he is too modest to talk of himself. He prefers to tell us how his firm is organized. He greatly admires the Germans for their efficiency but is not otherwise very keen about living with them. He finds the Germans too machine made, too materialistic to suit a Turk. His one ambition is to perfect himself in his profession and then to settle in Turkey where he will be able to give to his country the benefit of the knowledge he will have acquired. He wants to return to Germany for this purpose, but when we press him to tell us if it is for this purpose alone he admits that he has another more personal reason: he is engaged to a young girl in Munich and at the end of his leave his mother will accompany him to Germany where he will get married. The poor boy is heartbroken that his father, Ismet Bey, did not live long enough to meet his wife. Kemal speaks English most perfectly and says that his future wife does so also. He is therefore looking forward to having her meet her new cousin, my wife.

The drawing-room in which we were was a spacious room with many doors and windows. The lattices were up and the windows opened and the breeze from the Bosphorus is so cool at this season that the great open fireplace where big logs burned was barely enough to warm the room. We sat near the windows on a wide divan which skirted about one-fourth of the walls of the room, and to keep us warmer they had placed at the corner nearest to us, a big brazero of shining copper, filled with glowing charcoal. The windows were nearly over the water, so near in fact that the rustling of the current, which is quite strong on the Bosphorus, was plainly audible. It gave the impression of being on a ship: the blue waters ran southward in an endless chain of racing wavelets and the house seemed to be floating toward the north. But opposite us the green hills of Asia, with a line of houses skirting the shores and with big Anatolian mountains towering the blue-gray horizon reminded us that our seeming flight toward the Black Sea was only an illusion caused by the incessant rush of the current. Big “mahons” or Turkish barges which have kept the graceful lines of the old caiks, passed before our eyes, gliding silently on the blue wavelets, their Oriental triangular sails swelled in the breeze. A large Italian cargo boat plowed its way toward some romantic port of the Black Sea: Costanza, where Roumanian peasant girls will purchase its cargo of vividly coloured textiles in exchange for oil, so much needed in Italy, or perhaps Batoum, where a cosmopolitan crowd of traders will give flour, sugar and other food supplies to the starving population of Caucasia against non-edible jewels, furs or platinum of limitless value. Who knows? Perhaps it goes to Odessa or Novorossisk to try bartering with Tartars and Russians, Mongols and even Chinamen who now form the motley crowd of Bolshevik Southern Russia. The Bosphorus is the gate of a whole world—a world fraught with mysterious possibilities; tempting opportunities of stupendous gains, frightful danger of very real losses, commercial and political possibilities of such magnitude that it makes you shudder to think of them. And here we are at the very gate of this world, a gate patrolled as usual by England. See that gray destroyer, slim as an arrow, speeding toward its base, the harbour of Constantinople. It flies the British flag and is coming back from the Black Sea.

I am called back from my dreams and visions by Madame Ismet Bey who is pointing out the outstanding places of the landscape to my wife. From where we are the Bosphorus looks like a lake, the sinuous curves at the two ends making it impossible to distinguish where Europe ends and Asia begins. There, on our extreme left and near the water, is the country estate of Khedive Ismail Pasha, father of the last Khedive of Egypt who was dethroned by England during the war because of his pro-Turkish sentiments. Ismail Pasha's estate is in Europe but the hills which seem next to it are on the other side, in Asia, and the funny looking buildings on top as well as the low buildings on the shore are the depots of the Standard Oil Company. They used to belong to an uncle of Madame Ismet Bey but now they belong to the Standard Oil. No, her uncle has not sold his rights: it just happened that the Standard Oil stepped in before he had time to have them renewed. His house, or what used to be his house is the one just opposite us. He used to have the most beautiful caiks in the Bosphorus, ten or fifteen years ago, and his wife and his daughters would go every Friday to the Sweet Waters of Asia in those long, slim racing barks, with tapering ends, rowed by three or sometimes four boatmen with flowing sleeves, a beautiful embroidered carpet covering the stern, its corners trailing in the sea. He used to have a passion for flowers and you can see even from here the roof of the hot-house where he grew the most exotic plants he could think of: rare varieties of chrysanthemums and poppies from the Far East, tulips from Turkestan and Persia, mogra and lotus trees from India. Now he has sold his house and has barely enough to live on.