GRAND NATIONAL ASSEMBLY AT ANGORA.
p. 141
My guide is supposed to call for me at ten o’clock in the morning, but I have often enough rejoiced at his indifference to the clock. There is so much to sketch from our front door: an unused cemetery, with moss-covered stèles (tombstones) lying in picturesque confusion; a tumble-down shepherd’s hut; a crumbling mosque; mud houses in need of repair; and for background, a steep hill crowned by Timourlin’s tomb.
“There is so much to sketch from our front door.”
While painting, I have counted just four passers-by—two men leading their fruit-laden donkeys, and two women taking their asses to drink. No artist can resist Oriental landscapes; and genius, I suppose, would hardly remember to share my longing for nice warm “Western” baths in an atmosphere that means “microbes” in summer and in winter all kinds of discomfort.
The “sights” for tourists do not delay one many days. There are excellent “Red Cross” hospitals, a military hospital, an école normale for girls, a military school, the Ministries, town gardens, the Armenian Orphanage, the “Embassies,” and the Ottoman Bank. One can also enjoy long drives through miles of uncultivated land.
These various “institutions,” particularly the educational, are full of interest if one had time to thoroughly investigate the whole system, since probably no civilisation in the world differs so radically from our own.
Explorations, however extensive, must all be over before five o’clock. For as the eastern sun sets in its glory, we all go home—ministers and deputies to plan and work, the rest of the population to talk and wonder what the “great folk” are doing.
I never understood how all the people managed to hide themselves in so few houses. Turks, we all know, can perform miracles with mattresses and divans; but even their ingenuity can seldom have overcome so “tough a problem” as the inhabitants, official and civil, of Angora.
There is, admittedly, a housing “problem,” and building has not yet begun. As Angora is to be the permanent seat of Government, they cannot much longer delay the important consideration of providing for Foreign Embassies.