To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise

by Ely Banister Soane

Round three sides of an irregular square courtyard were built rooms of mud, three of which had no wall on the courtyard side, making a shady, cool place to sit in the summer. The winter rooms, with doors opening from these chambers, possessed each but a single glazed door barely five feet high. One of these, the best, was whitened with gypsum, and the rest plastered with the mixture of chaff and mud that is the chief ingredient of the mason’s trade in the Middle East. The floors were of unmixed mud, smoothed as well as the stamping of bare feet could do it. In the midst of the yard a stream of cold, clear water bubbled up from a hole, filling a cistern of plaster and brick nearly level with the ground, under a large willow-tree that made a shady place to drink tea in the morning and afternoon. The landlady, as owner of this mansion, worth fifty pounds, was reckoned wealthy according to the Kurdish idea. She let the rooms to a couple of families for a total of half a crown a month, and having relations and friends who kept her supplied with flour and oil, lived comfortably. Here, where bread is made in the house, and is the main article of food, living comes cheaply enough.

Here I rested awhile, passing the time in conversation with the woman of the house, a good-looking Kurd of not more than thirty years, who by the sensible custom of Kurdistan is free to go about unveiled, and hold all her dealings with men as if she were a reasoning being, conducting all her affairs herself, a type of the only Middle Eastern race whose women are almost as free as the women of Europe, their only restriction being that they shall not go to the bazaar, or if they do, they must cover their heads. In Persia, or among other Musulmans, for two strange men to live in a house full of women, as was this, would be an unheard of atrocity, but here it was thought no more of than such a thing in England.

RETURN TO SULAIMANIA

After eating a lunch of new bread, fresh from the oven, in leaves two feet across, with some “kebab” Hama brought from the bazaar, I set out to find Matti the Christian, who had shown himself so friendly before, and discovered him in his office with his younger brother Ismail, who assisted him. I had not been there a few minutes before Habib Badria appeared, and took his seat upon the bench outside the office, from which he could converse with the inmates; and I was introduced to a much older man, Antoine, and a younger one, Bihnan, who spoke French remarkably well. These were all the Mosul Christians in the caravanserai, and being just as inquisitive as anyone else, took the first opportunity of making the acquaintance of a stranger. They were quiet, well-mannered men, and finding that I had business, strolled off to their offices, with the exception of Habib Badria, who remained, being a special friend of Matti.

Both of them advised me, as I had merchandise, to take a small house near the bazaar for a time, and live with my goods, and they both shut their offices and prepared to take me on a hunt for a suitable house. Apparently they were well informed, for, passing out of the caravanserai we traversed a bazaar, turned up a blind alley, at the end of which we came to a house which they wished to show me, and which I agreed to take. This was vacated by the death of the owner, a merchant who had been murdered by Arabs on the way to Bagdad. He had left in charge, when he left, his old mother, a pure-blooded Kurd, who gloried in her uncontaminated descent, constantly asserting that she was not a converted Jew like the rest of the Sulaimanians.

Her house was built in imitation of Kurdish architecture as developed in Persia, a type common and growing commoner in Persia.

The door opened from the street into the corner of a stone-paved courtyard, and one came under the shelter of a couple of square yards of mud roofing supported upon pillars. Behind the door were a couple of articles like big earthenware shovels, upon the ground. This was the kitchen. The strip from here to the opposite end of the yard was occupied by flower-beds containing hollyhocks and roses, and a cistern raised a foot above the ground-level.

The house, standing opposite, was a two-storeyed one of three rooms below, each opening from the yard by a door, too low for a boy of twelve to enter erect. The best of these rooms, the centre one, boasted a second pair of doors, glazed, and the ceiling was made of short boards, the remains of sugar-boxes. The interior was washed in pinkish mud over the yellow underneath, and the ground was as that of the unpaved alley outside.

Upstairs, however, the architect had shown his skill. The best room, which jutted out from the frontage line some six feet, was whitened entirely with burnt gypsum, and ornamented by fresco and dado in raised patterns of that material.

The pillars between the wall-recesses bore inlaid mirrors, and the ceiling was painted in flowers and stars with scraps of looking-glass here and there in patterns. Three double glass doors with the glass set in huge fretwork patterns looked out over the yard, and the fourth, a wooden door of walnut and oak, opened into the middle room or verandah, from which steps of remarkable inequality descended to the yard. The supporting pillars of the roof of this portico—which replaced the fourth wall—were tree-trunks enclosed in narrow walnut planks, making them octagonal, with long narrow mirrors a foot high inserted at eye height. The ceiling was boarded. The third room would have been like the best one, had not the owner died before he could finish his house, and it had remained in yellow mud and beamed ceiling; and the doors, put in afterwards, were of plain white glass.