Next morning Mustapha Kemal sent his car (a present from the people of Smyrna) that I might be driven to his villa at Tchan-Kaya, almost twenty minutes’ ride from Angora. This is the best road in the district; the others are just rows of holes and bumps on which someone has thrown some cobbles and, incidentally, some houses! Though Tchan-Kaya was given to him by the people, he has handed over this property to the army, and lives there as their guest—surely an unusual, but charming, example of brotherly love. I wonder whether the Pasha will do the same in the house I saw, also presented to him, at Broussa, which an historian and architect came over from Constantinople to redecorate.
From Tchan-Kaya one obtains an excellent bird’s-eye view of Angora; whether at midday or at sunset, sprinkled with, or buried in, snow, always picturesque. We get a few hours of sunshine every morning until quite late in the year; enough to welcome the beautiful white minarets, so marked a feature in every Eastern scene, whence the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer five times a day. Dotted over the hills of Tchan-Kaya we see the Pasha’s special guard—the Lasz—wearing a uniform our ladies would be delighted, I think, to copy in velvet or satin. The fashion, however, would only suit those who, like these soldiers from Trébizonde, are tall, slight, and well-built.
At the door one gladly accepts the vociferous greeting of a fine brown retriever. Then comes the aide-de-camp, Mahmoud Bey, always ready with a gay smile for his chief’s guests, who leads one straight into the house.
The kiosk is large and well-built. In the combination of hall and ante-room a white marble fountain is always playing. One of the two pianos in Angora stands in a corner; these are both, alas, more ornamental than useful, made, one could guess, somewhere about 55 B.C.! A large desk, some fine plants, and the usual Turkish or Persian rugs complete the furniture. One door leads into the Pasha’s mother’s apartments, the other to his own sitting-room.
On the wall of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s study the Sultan Osman, first of the House of Osman, looks down on Mustapha Kemal Pasha, who has ended the dynasty.
I could scarcely believe that I was speaking to the legislator, as my host rose to greet me from his Western red-leather sofa. Without his kalpak, his fair hair, well brushed back, his close-cropped moustache, his well-tailored clothes with the correct crease, would surely carry him through a London drawing-room without a guess that he was not English, or, at any rate, not from the North. Again, his keen sense of humour is not common among the Turks, and it was a delight to find how heartily he joined in the laugh which his delightful stories provoked.
I am told that the Pasha’s type and colouring are not uncommon in his native Roumelia—as ever, the North is fair!
Noticing some “Napoleon” literature on one of the writing-tables, I regretted that “I had not thought of bringing a book about the ‘little Corsican,’ instead of merely offering my congratulations on a magnificent victory.”
“Please never think of such a thing,” he replied. “He interests me as a great general, but——”