By Louis De Bernieres
“Man is a bird
without wings and a bird is a man without sorrows.”
As a history
lesson, what you learn is The word “Ottoman” would fall into disuse and
disrepute until such time as the inevitable revisions of later days, when the
world would realize that the Ottoman Empire had been cosmopolitan tolerant.
This book for me is a continuation of my explorations
into Turkish culture. It is the Turkish
version of War and Peace. Though there
is no relation in storyline or time period the book essentially follows the
same format as Tolstoy in describing family and village life and the effects
war has on peace. The setting is a
sleepy town on the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea called Esckbece. The town is now called Ismir. The time period for the main storyline, told
from many different character views, covers the demise of the Ottoman Empire
approximately the turn of the 20th century through the Turkish
revolution. Any review of the book
cannot pin exact dates because of the anachronistic style of storytelling. The main story teller is an old woman of whom
the author, a man, captures “the old woman” persona perfectly. She owns a witty sense of humor in detailing the
ironies of the cultural clashes that undermined the Ottoman ability to keep up
with and then defend against the Imperialism of the Western powers.
The clashes involve; Islam-v-Christianity,
Armenian-v-Turk, Eastern Anatolia-v-Bulgaria, Greek-v-Ottoman, western
fashion-v-Ottoman fashion, the colorful life of a Christian-v-the grey life of
a Muslim. In Esckabece, while there were
differences that each would gossip about, there was an inbred kinship where the
common denominator was Ottoman. The
first half of the book portrays a time of peace where the clashes are take on
the spirit of gossip amongst women at the well and men in for coffee houses. It seemed that the gossip was primarily from
the women, while the men pursued their goals of work and the game of backgammon.
To describe it in general terms, the Christians from Bulgaria and Greece were
colorful with a Christian holiday being celebrated with drunken hooliganism almost
every day. In the balance, the Muslims
lived a bland and disciplined day to day life.
While the women would gossip, ironically each had a best friend from
“the other religion.” In my personal
experience living in Manhattan I observed this blend of multiculturalism. New Yorkers love each other in their way, the
same way Ottomans did in 1910. They were
Ottomans first, and their religion came in second…tied for first. I think that is a Yogi Bearism.
Blended into the story is the life of Mustafa Kemel later
known as Ataturk, the first President of Turkey, and the George Washington of
Turkey. Kemel’ mindset came from western
Ottoman, but was clearly of Turkish mindset holding one exception.
The Turkey he envisioned needed to get into the 20th
Century. Turkey needed to adopt the ways
of the West. This included education,
custom, government structure, and even dress code. Kemel liked to enjoy life. But he also was a Muslim and respected its
discipline. He rose through the ranks
with a lot of conflict with his superiors.
He disagreed with the strategy of his superiors. Where the military political agendas merged with the political parties, he was of
his own mind. Blending the Ataturk story
with the personal saga of those small lives in Eskabece gives the book of a
sense of authentic history and a real human level. The book is clearly a history novel on par
with anything that Michener.
The war element describes WWI and the Turkish Revolution
from an Ottoman’s perspective. This
setting could not be complete without dragging into it the eighty years the
preceded it. Boyhood friends would be
conscripted in to the Ottoman army either as a soldier for Muslims or a civil engineer for Christians
to support the war effort. The life of
either left each totally altered as a human being. While they endured the horrors and atrocities
of war, their families endured the famines that war bestowed upon them. The Muslim-v-Christian divide tore through
Eskabece as ethnic groups were exported to various new countries, and many
massacred along the way, according to the new religious orientation. Ironically when the town’s folk were forced
to leave, they would ask why. Their
masters would say because you are Christian or Muslim. They would say, ‘but I am Ottoman and this is
my home.” Their dear Muslim friends
would concur and then cry at the departure of their Christians.
Today as I do business in Turkey I now benefit from
reading this book. I already love the people
and the country. I now better understand
the Turkish history that formulates their mindset. I can see the mix of the Christian colorful
life upon a very clear straight forward Muslim people. The lines are delineated and casually crossed
at the same time. Women do not wear
burkas but some do wear babushkas with little or no make up. But it is not uncommon to observe at a bus
stop one generation of woman dressed in a classic double breasted rain coat and
babushka standing next to a very attractive young woman wearing ‘western yoga
pants’ (speaking of contradiction) and a
T-shirt. The men… they still play
backgammon, they still smoke huka. And
so do the women. Turkey is clearly a
first world 21st Century country of predominate Western life style. But they have kept the best of East-West, old-new. They are one of the most enjoyable people
I’ve come to know firsthand. This book
is the bridge they crossed.
Bibliography:
Page 6: Destiny
caresses the few, but molests the many, and finally every sheep will hang by
its own foot on the butchers hook, just as every grain of wheat arrives at the
millstone, no matter where it grew.
Page 7: Since
those times of whirlwind the world has learned over and over again that the
wounds of the ancestors make the children bleed.
Page 13: They say
that a man is most when he is mounted either on his wife or his horse.
Page 14: In his
wisdom he had recognized that the worst punishment is to be beneath
noticability
Page 44 “Man is a bird without wings” Iskander told them
“and a bird is a man without sorrows.”
Page 50: Stamos
the Birdman blinked and rubbed his nose with his hand. There was something about the sunlight of
spring that made his eyes itch and his nose want to sneeze He looked at Polyxenia and said, “ Well the
mystery is a shallow one, and not very difficult to fathom, Polyxeni
Hanim. I clip their wings because most
people don’t want to buy a bird that might escape so they have to sprout their
own feathers in a flash and take off in hot pursuit. Most people couldn’t be bothered, you see. People make off birds; and they don’t fly
much.
Page 51: her daughter, Phitlthei, with her best friend,
Drousal, Gerasimos, son of the fisherman, all running about in the oleanders
and the Lycian tombs, leaping from rock to rock, as usual, to be birds. …but it is a child’s privilege to enact the
dreams that are denied to the sane. Her
daughter, the lovely Philothei, waved her arms with the detached elegance with
which she did almost everything, and Ibrahim
flapped and pranced nearby, always in her line of sight, hoping beyond
hope that she would notice how truly like a bird he was.
Page 53: Polyxeni
asks. “If we had wings, do oyu think we would suffer so much in one place? Don’t you think we would fly away to
paradise?
Page 59: Some
people said that when God took the cart of vices around the world, He stopped
for a rest in Arabia and the Arabs stole it.
Page 57:
[metaphor] You know what they say: ‘Day denies the promise of
night.” And you know what they say: ‘The
ink of the learned is equal in merit to the blood of the martyrs.’
Page 58: [metaphor] They munched in happy and enjoyable
silence, of the kind that grows like a vine through the long years of good
marriage, so that everything that needs to be said has already pronounced, it
is mutually understood that there is an intimate silence that has its own
loquacity.
Page 62: [metaphor] “look a fart never broke any
flagstones, so why don’t you just keep your mouth shut.”
Page 64:
[metaphor] feeling like mackerel who have suddenly found themselves
swimming with dolphins.
Page 76: As they
passed the house of Daskalos Leonidas, Ayse rolled her eyes and whispered; “It’s
incredible! A man with that much
education and he didn’t even know about how to get a massage to the dead.
Page 78: Mustafa
Kemal in 1899. “is no a little nobody
from the provinces, as perplexed by the
rowdy modernist history of the Christian sector of the city as he is by the
medieval torpor and decay of the Muslim
parts.
Page 78: Ali
introduces his friend to raki, and Mustafa (Kemel) takes one sip and says,
“What a wonderful drink this is. It makes one want to be a poet.” Raki will shape Kenal’s destiny. It will help him sleep, overcome shyness,
free his inspiration, complicate his relationships and finally kill him. Mustafa Kemal continues to read the works of
the great French thinkers, and starts to develop the idea that something must
be done to save his country both from foreigners and from itself.
He becomes simultaneously and admirer of Napoleon
Bonaparte and John Stuart Mill, taking from the latter the idea that all moral
and political action should tend towards the greatest happiness of the greatest
number
The Sultan has become a strangely half-baked tyrant, of
such self-doubting paranoia and vacillating incompetence, such a self-defeating
mixture of concilitiatorieness and absolution, that not even his own officers
feel much allegiance to him any more.
Page 79: Mustafa
Kemal’s mother is convinced that he is going to be executed, but Mustafa
contently spends his time in prison writing poetry and reading.
Page 80: The boys
tipped water from their leather bottles into their birdwhistles , and for a few
minutes vied with each other to produce the longest and most elaborate cascades
of birdsong.
Page 81: “It’s
what Arabs speak. And it’s what God speaks,
and that’s why we have to recite it.
It’s something about being merciful and the Day of Judgement and showing
us the right path, and if anything is going wrong, or you’re worried, or
someone is sick, you just have to say al-Fatiihah and everything will probably
be all right.”
“Don’t you learn the al-Fatihah, then?”
“When things go wrong, we say ‘Kyre eleison’, and we’ve
got a proper prayer as well.”
“what’s it like?”
Mehmetcik screwed up his eyes in inconscious imitation of
his friend, and recited Pater imon, o en trios, agiasthito to onoma sour…
Kataravuk asked, “What’s that about then? Is that some
kind of language?
“It’s Greek. It’s
what we speak to God. I don’t know
exactl- what it means, it’s something about our father who’s in heaven and
forgive us our daily bread, and lead us not into temptation, but it
doesn’t matter if we don’t understand
it, because God does.”
Page 82: “I want
reading and writing,” said Kartvuk firmly.
“You Christians are always richer than us, and my father says it’s all
because of reading and writing and adding up and taking away, and that’s why
you’re good at deceiving us, and he says that we Muslims only learn what we
need to get into paradise, which is all that matters in the end, but you
Christians get all the advantages on earth because you learn all the other
things as well. I want those other
things too.”
Page 98: Mustafa
Kemel is depressed and appauled by Damascus; it is a place without vivacity or
pleasure, a place that endures the interminable passage from birth to death
behind closed doors and shutters. It is
utterly moribund, marooned, medieval, stunted and paralysed by tradition,
neurotic respectability and absolutist religion.
At the house of Haji Mustafa a secret society is
formed. It is called “Vatan” and it is
just like a hundred other secret societies that will soon be springing up all
over the empire, wherever there are educated young officers who wish to reshape
their country. Romantic and passionate
speeches are made. Mustafa Kemal drily
reminds his co-conspirators the object is not to die for the revolution, but to
live for it.
Page 99: The
conspirators are preoccupied by the obvious decline of the empire, and so its
intransigent political corruption and inefficiency. The feel themselves humiliated and dishonored
by the way that it is being disrupted, hamstrung and gulled by the Great
Powers.
Page 100 Mustafa
Kemal is just beginning to conceive the notion of a Turkish state withing the
secure borders, with accretions of empire permanently removed.
“Turkey is for Turks.”
One day Mustafa Kemal will say, “Happy is the man who calls himself a
Turk,” and this will be carved into hill sides all over Antolia. It will become the truth because it was
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who said it.”
Page 104: [metaphor]
but some people were secretly pleased because if there is one thing
that’s like a gnat in the ear and a flea
up the nose for most people it’s when they see that someone else is doing
better than they are.
Page 105:
[metaphor] and I’m not having you catching it (the wedding bouquet)
because if you do I’ll take you to Haleb and sell you to an Arab with five wives and I mean it.
Page 105: We
washed her down and cleaned her wounds with raki, not that we have raki, but I
sent Hasseki off to borrow raki from Polyxeni wife of Charitos, because to
borrow raki from a Christian is more reputable because the rest of us aren’t
suppose to have it, even though we do, except in our house.
Page 107: no women
veiled herself in the countryside because it would have been impossible to
work, and women who covered themselves in this town small as it was, merely did
so as a point of vanity, to indicate that they enjoy a leisuresome life.
Page 107: [“Tamara
Hanium, would you like some mastika?” he
asked, passing a hand through the drapes.
“It must get very tedious for you, lying in there like a carrot laid up
for winter.”
Page 108:
“Remember, daughter, it is midwinter that the almond blooms.”
Page 110: [metaphor] faithful as a shadow
Page 111: From the outside there came an extraordinary
flurry of very loud and exuberant birdsong that could not possibly come from
birds, and Asye raised her
eyebrows….”It’s Mehmetich and Karatavuk, calling each other on those
birdwhistles again.”
Page 118: [metaphor]
He needed someone to meld with. He knew himself to be something like a garden
where the only flowers were those of potatoes, ragweed, and neglected onions,
but were a true gardener would have been
able to drape the trellises with vines, and coax up tulips from the earth. It would be too simple to say that Rusten Bey
was looking for romantic love, because in reality he was looking for the
missing part of himself, and these are not often the same quest, even though
sometimes they are.
Page 134: The
Sultan is forced to restore the old liberal constitution of 1876. The handsom Enver appears on the balcony of
the Olympus Palace Hotel, and proclaims the new policy of Ottomanism. There will be no more special privileges for
particular ethnic and religious groups, and from now on all obligations and
rights are the same for everybody. There
is euphoria in Salonika. Rabbis and
imams embrace, political prisoners emerge, astonished, into the light. Agents of the Sultan are murdered, and the bodies are spat upon the streets.
The revolution is a half baked affair. It has no real plan and no real ideology
beyond the intention to restore the empire to its previous strength. The revolutionaries do not comprehend the
power and seduction of the new nationalisms.
The Christians are not necessarily pleased at having earned the right to
compulsory military service and become free Ottoman citizens, and very soon
Young Turks find that they have accelerated the disintegration of the empire
instead of arresting it. Bulgaria
declares independence. Crete declares
union with Greece. Austria illegally and
opportunistically annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina, and thereby setting in train
the dismal events that will destroy the entire course of European history for
more than a hundred years.
Page 141: When
Sadettin emerged into the selamlik, his shirt was glistening with the dark
blood that his sister had cought up, and it was as if he had become another
man. ….
“Where will you go?” asked his father.
“Where do birds go?”
Asked Sadettin. He gestured in
the direction of the Taurus Mountains, rising up from the Elysian coastal plain
like a vast and somber fortress.
Page 143: the
Russians massacred and displaced the Muslim populations, swamping the Ottoman
Empire with refugees with which it could not cope.
This has never made any difference to Christians, since
the primary epiphenomena of any religion’s foundation are the production and
flourishment of hypocrisy, megalomania and psychopathy, and the first
casualties of a religion’s establishment are the intentions of its
founder. One can imagine Jesus and Mohammed
glumly comparing notes in paradise, scratching their heads and bemoaning their
vain expense and suffering, which resulted only in the construction of two monumental
whited sepulchers.
Unsurprisingly, to Ottoman ears the word “Armenian”
became virtually synonymous with “traitor” and thus was life made arduous or
dangerous for those hundred of thousands of Armenians scattered throughout the
empire and living side by side with Ottomans of other denominations and races.
Page 154:
[metaphor] Rumors are the great seducers of reason.
Page 160: The
respectable Muslims of Scutari, on the other side of the water, used to like to
whisper in prurient and self-righteous tones that in Galata there lived the
worst kinds of Greeks.
Page 173: Rustem
Bey senses that his life has been take off course, but he does not care. … and here Kardelen shudders theatrically and
rolls her eyes, “…well it’ll be a
disaster. Remember she’s a virgin, and
she’s a mistress, not a wife, so don’t treat her like one. I trust you know what I mean? A wife is a cross between a slave and a broad
mare, nut a mistress is the smell of a rose that comes in through the shutters
in a summer night. Think of her as
semi-divine.”
Page 188:
[metaphor] as rare as a feathered goat
Page 203: A woman wailed somewhere out in the streets,
and those who were awake shuddered.
There had been a time when everyone had believed that the wailing woman
was a ghost, but eventually it transpired that it was just someone who had lost
all her sons in the wars that the imperiled empire had been fighting year upon
year. So many conscripted sons had been
lost that at night the town consented to let the maddened woman wail for all of
them.
Page 214: as far
as she was concerned the hamam was a sacred place in which one accomplished
nothing.
Page 215: There
was nothing like a woman’s beauty for sowing discord in the world, and everyone
knew many tragical stories concerning it.
Page 215: “
‘Infidel’ is a word that should be picked up
from a safe distance with tongs,” replied Abdulhamid. “To you I am an infidel, and to me you are an
infidel. So neither one of us is an
infidel, or we both are. The Angel
commanded the Prophet, peace be upon him, to write that for every nation there
is a messenger, and for every nation there is an appointed time, and to write
that for each God has appointed a divine law and a predetermined way. We are commanded to vie with one another in
good works, and when we all return, God will inform us of the things wherein we
differ. Your prophet, Jesus Son of Mary,
peace be upon him, commanded his disciples to go out among the Gentiles. So we will have no more talk of
infidels. And you forget the Philothei
has been betrothed to Ibrahim, and obviously she will become a Muslim when they
marry. Will she then be an infidel?
Page 232: “We are
all Ottomans now. Times have
changed. Anyway, lookat all my
servants. What are they? They are all Turks.
“Alexander?” sneered his father. “Spreading our culture and civilization
all over the world? Well, forgive me my heterodoxy, but he did it
by spreading slaughter from Macedonia to
India. How may weeping widows and raped virgins went and thanked him for
culture, do you suppose?
I’ll tell you something my son, said his father, jabbing in his direction
with a fork. I’ll have more respect for
Alexander, and you and your friends if you were bright enough to understand
that it’s money and enterprise and brains that make the world turn around. All these military campaigns, and
revolutions, and conspiracies, and talk about racial that … What do they
bring? Bloodshed and disaster. If you want to be any use to the world, put
money in your pocket.
Page 234: Give me
hypocrisy any time, which is something all of us could profitability learn from
the English, I’d say.”
I had seen the little clay whistles that he made in the
shape of various birds, which you half filled with water, and then they warble
like a bird when you blew into them.
Such toys were very common of course, but his were definitely a cut
above the rest because the quality of the design and decoration, and because
they always sounded like the bird they represented, which by no means usual
with other people’s.
Page 236: There
was a small group of people there who had turned Turk because they had got fed
up with the exactions of Lent, and it wasn’t uncommon for Turks to go into
churches and light candles.
Page 238: some of
the Christians lit candles and placed them in the sandbox as you might expect,
but then knelt down and prayed whilst making Muslim prostrations.
Page 240: I just
know that there are an awful lot of Alevis, they’re different from other
Muslims, and you can scratch your head wondering, should you feel so inclined,
whether they’re really Muslims at all. A
lot of the men there were called Ali, if that is of any interest.
Page 246: Leyla
Hanim once told me that if you make a man feel stupid he will hate you, so I took
her advice and kept quiet about it.
Page 250: “A
matter of battleships. Apparently the
British sold us some battleships, and now, because of their own war, they are
keeping then back from us. You remember,
the money was raised by public subscription, and so everyone is very angry.
Page 250: “As for wrong doing. Nawwas ibn Saman said that he overheard the
Prophet saying that wrongdoing is that which wavers in the soul and which you
dislike people finding out about, and Eabisa ibn Mabid said the he heard the
Prophet say that wrongdoing is that which wavers in the soul and moves to and
fro in the breast, even though people again and again have given their legal
opinion in its favor.
Page 253: Mustafa
Kemel tours Bulgaria to see himself how the Turkish minority lives. He is surprised but gratified to find them
running businesses and industries, becoming rich by their own efforts, sending
their children to schools where there are proper curricula, and not merely the
recitations of the Koran in Arabic. The
women are unveiled. Mustafa Kemal
becomes clearer about what he wants for Turkey.
He attends the Bulgarian parliament in order to witness the modern
practice of politics. He involves
himself with more or less clandestine
projects involving the Turkish community.
However, the most impressive things is how ordinary Bulgarians have
advanced in the few years since they threw off the Ottoman yoke. Once upon a time they were regarded as
savages, but now they have forged ahead.
Page 254: Only
hindsight will reveal what a catastrophe that dependence on Germany will bring
in its train. The Archduke Ferdinand has
been assassinated in Sarajevo, and now Enver and inner cabal of the Cabinet
have agreed on a secret treaty with Germany, with the intention of presenting a
united front against Russia, the eternal enemy and arch-devil. All attempts to seek assistance and
assurances from Great Britain and France have failed, and the Germans had
seemed the obvious last resort. Enver
keeps the Great Powers in the dark about his agreement, until he is ready to
take offense.
The Ottoman public is outraged and two German battleships
synchronisticaly turn up, having gallantly run the gauntlet of the British
fleet. The Germans generously, but
entirely disinterestedly, sell the ships to Enver, the sailors exchange caps
for fezzes, and Germany becomes ever more popular with the Turkish people.
Enver is convinced that he can get the entire Muslim
world behind him by playing the Islamic card, thus disabling mush of the Russian,
British, and French empires.
Thanks to Enver’s idiotic adventurism the Ottoman Empire
is now at war with Russia, which is at war with Germany and
Austria-Hungry. As if this were not bad
enough, Because Russia herself has allies, the Ottoman Empire is now at war
with Britain and France as well. The
reluctant Sultan who also has the misfortune to be head of the Muslim world, is
persuaded to declare the war a holy one.
They did not know that Enver Pasha has a great vision to
pursue, of expanding the Ottoman Empire to the east, to include all the Turkic
peoples. This was an age when everyone
wanted an empire and felt entitled to one, days of innocence perhaps, before
the world realized, if it yet has, that empires were pointless and expensive,
and their subject peoples rancorous and ungrateful. Perhaps it galled Enver Pasha that over the
previous ninety years the empire had repeatedly and relentlessly been under
malicious and opportunistit attack from its neighbors and former territories.
The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism, and
religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral
metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds vile if
they were done by another.
There was between 1821 and 1913 a prolonged holocaust
which we have chosen to forget, and from
which we have learned absolutely nothing. In 1821, between 26 March and Easter Sunday,
in the name of liberty,the southern Greek Christans tortured and massacred
15,000 Greel Muslims, looted their possessions, and burned their
dwellings. The Greek hero Kolotronis
boasted without qualm that so many were corpses that his hirse’s hooves never
had to touch the ground between the town gates of Athens and the citidal. In the Peloponnese, many thousands of
Muslims, mainly women and children were rounded up and butchered. Thousands of shrines and mosques were
destroyed, so that even now there are only one or two left in the whole of
Greece. Durning the 1820’s, as a result
of war against Serbia and Russia, 20,000 Musloms were expelled from Serbia.
In 1875, Orthodox Bosnian Christians began a campaign or
assassination against Muslims in general and Ottoman officials in particular.
In 1876, Bulgarian Christians massacred an unknown number
of peasants of Turkish origin.
Asa consequence of this campaign or extermination, a vast
swarm of half a million starving Muslim refugees of one religion but of all
ethnic backgrounds took to the roads, driven hither and thither without rest by
bandits, guerrillas and soldiers. In
Erdine one hundred of them died each day of typhus. In Istanbul’s great church of Aya Sofya, then
a mosque, there huddled fourthousand hopeless souls, of whom thirty died every
day, only to be replaced by others.
Alongside and among these Muslims, almost unnoticed by history, suffered
and died Jews, because the common cry of the lliberatins heros in those days
was Jews and Turks Out!
The Montenegrins killed or expelled their entire Muslim
population
By 1879, one-third of all Muslims of Bosnia-Herzogovina
had either emigrated or been killed.
Sir Henry Layard, British Ambassador to the Sublime Port
wrote that the policy of the Russians in the region was to eliminate the
Muslims and replace them with Slavs.
In 1912, Bulgeria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece all
declared war on the Ottoman Empire with the intention of seizing more Ottoman
territory and bringing about forced migration.
To the tactics described above was added the technique of herding
Muslims into coffeehouses and barns, and burning them down. As before, civilian men were killed quickly,
but women were tortured to death as slowly as possible. Captured Ottoman soldiers were treated with
particular brutality. In Erdine the
defeated soldiers were put on an island and starved to death. The history books coyly declare that the
details of the horrors that were perpetrated are too gruesome to report.
Page 258: Also
ruined was the Ottoman Empire’s greatest achievement, the millet system which
guaranteed religious liberty for all.
Despite some lapses, for almost all of its history the empire had
protected the different denominations, allowing them to administer their own affairs and follow
their own laws.
Now, however, the hell’s broth of religious and
nationalist hatred, had been stirred up by a multitude of village Hitlers, and
the Balkans were irreparably changed for the worse.
Page 259: It was
very simple. Briton and France were old
yet exacting friends of the empire, but they were allied with Russia, and every
Turk kno w that Russia wanted Turkey in its empire, preferably without any
Turks left alive in it. An Allied
victory would have been a sanguinary catastrophe for the Turks, and a
satisfying, final solution for Russians.
It must have been clear to Enver Pasha that his enemy’s enemy was his
friend, and he had no choice but to gamble on a German victory. Apart from that, there was a century of
disaster to make up for, and no one can know how much he was motivated by
injured pride on behalf of its own people.
If so, it was an irony that his own incompetence and ambition should
result in yet more disaster for his country, for instead of fighting a sensible
defensive war.
Page 260: In any
case this crucifixion of children ny Christians was quite a common thing in his experience, and the
shock of it eventually wore off.
…Sergeant Osamn seldom thought of the vile things that he himself had
done whilst in the baresark rage of victory or revenge, because it was all
wiped out and cancelled by this one scene that overtopped and out played them
all.
Page 265:
Karatavuk reached once more into his sash and took out his
birdwhistle. “I’m taking this with
me. If I break it I will write to my
father and ask him to send me another one.
When I return you’ll hear it and you’ll know I’m back.”
Page 269: “I have
an opinion about holy war, which in general I must keep to myself. I have no wish to be known as a heretic. It is …that if a war can be holy, then God
cannot. At best a war can only be
necessary.”
Page 270: “God
gives us hardships and sorrow. I want to
ask God. ‘Why do we deserve it”’ Did I
tell you that Karatavuk says he will write letters to us? I asked him how, thinking that he would find
a comrade to write for him, and he told me that Mehmetich taught him to read
and write when they were boys, writing in the dust with sticks. I knew nothing about it. I was amazed, and then I was happy, and then
I thought, ‘But how will I read them?”
Page 284: Now
Enver wishes to attack Russia. He has
long dreamed of expanding the empire to the east, a dream that he will never
relinquish, and which will be the main reason for the loss of the war, and he
also wants an immediate offensive to the south.
Page 286: It was
true that this war was a jihad, and therefore he would be bound to die gladly
for the love of God, but all the same it was puzzeling to the faith when one
learned that Arabs had sided with the British, as has the Muslims from the
other side of Persia. It seemed that
only Turks took the jihad seriously. “ I
amd a Turk, he thought, rolling the idea around in his mind, remembering the
days when the word Turk implied something almost shameful, a barbarian out of
the East. Nowadays, instead of saying
“we are Osmanlis” or “ We are Ottomans,” people were sayins “Yes we are
Turks.” How strange that the world
should change because of words, and words change because of the world. “Iskander the Turk,” he said to himself, internally
scrutinizing the strange and novel sensation of possessing a deeper identity,
of being something beyond himself. Some
people said that the word “Turk” meant strength.
Page 289: [metaphor]
It was true that the Christians always had the advantage, they learned
to read and write, and do complicated things with numbers, and that was why you
always had to be suspicious of them, and that was why they made you feel
stupid, but it was also why you depended upon themso often for help. Iskander had gone to the mektep when he was a
child, and had learned nothing except to recite by heat the holy versus of the
Koran. The Arabic phrases still rolled
off his tounge, but he knew not what might mean, and yes he would go to
paradise, but it was the Jews and Christians who organized the world. “Fortunately,” thought Iskander, “for the bird
that cannot soar, God has provided low branches.”
Page 292: Whilst
he waited, he noticed that there was something odd about the songbird that
occupied the cage by the door. Almost
everyone had a finch, or nightingale, or a yellow hammer, or a robin, so that
at dawn and dusk, at the same time as the muezzin called from the minaret of
the mosque, the birds would fill the town with their own call to prayer.
Page 295: Tell the
mother of Memetcik to tell Memetick that I have the birdwhistle, and that I
remember him.
Page 297: When I
think back to those early days, the first thing I recall was that all of us
believed it was a holy war. We were told
this over and over again, and every unit had an imam who repeated it it to us,
and the Sultan himself declared that it was a jihad. As the first fighting broke out on the Feats
of the Sacrifice, we all understood that it was we who were the lambs. I will say now that I doubt if there is any
such thing as a holy war, because war is unholy by nature, just as a dog is by
nature, and I will say now, since no one will read these lines until I am dead,
that in my opinion there is no God either…
Page 298: But at
that time not one of us doubted that it was a holy war, and all of us were
intoxicated with the idea of martyrdom, and the imams told us that if we died
in a holy war, then we would meet the Prophet himself in the garden where he
abides, and we would be carried there by the green birds of paradise, that come
only for martyrs, ….
To tell the truth, I often enjoy the fighting. There is a wild excitement that takes you
over when the attacks begin, and the fear and trembling has been overruled by
action. Sometimes I feel sad when I
remember the enthusiasm of those days,
because I was never happier than when I had those beliefs and thought I was
doing God’s work.
Page 303: The next
day we rose up prepared for martyrdom,
and we talked about the green birds that would take us to paradise, and virgins
that awaited us , … We waited for the ships to come back, but they did not come
back that day or days after. … The triumph swelled our chests and we felt
like giants, and we who had believed that God was with us, believed now more
than before, and those who had not believed it began to do so, because the fact
is that the artillery at the narrows had only thirt shells left, and the Franks
could have sailed past us in the morning.
My comment: I have
read accounts of the ammunition supply elsewhere, and now start to think there
is a higher level of historic accounting blended into this novel.
Page 314: Kemal reminds
the regiment that they have the disgraceful losses of the Balkan Wars to
redeem. He issues the famous
statement: “ I am not ordering you to attack, I am
ordering you to die, by the time we are dead, other units and other commanders
will arrive to take our place.” Kemal personally
helps to shoulder the batteries into position, and controls the battle from the
skyline. Miraculously, he is not
hit. Inspired by Kemal, inspired by
jihad, the 57th Regiment manages to hold the Australian advance, and
is almost completely wiped out. Within a
short time, even the imam and the water boy will be dead, and the 57th
Regiment will enter into Turkish myth.
Page 318: it was
salutary to discover there is at least one among you with both brains and
initiative, causing me to speculate as to whether the backwardness of your race
is more explicable in terms of deficient education than of natural
ability. I have always thought it odd
that this education consists entirely in uselessly memorizing pages in Arabic
that no one can understand.
Page 318: [metaphor]
For me it is like having to use a golden spoon to clear out a drain.
Page 319: There is
much trouble in this place. We who had
nothing now have even less. Everything
that was bad is now worse. Nothing is
mended, no good things arrive by road or sea.
We are lucky if there is one onion to eat, the tradesmen have no one to
trade with.
Page 320: We are
not sure that they are good, because God gave it to birds to fly and to us to
walk. If we are to become like birds,
what will birds become? What if a man
flies so high that he reaches Heaven?
What will God do?
Page 321: There
are no doctors here now because they are all Christians and they have gone to
look after the soldiers even though no Christian is allowed to fight, and we
are helpless if we are ill except for the cures passed down to us.
Page 327: People
would be surprised if they knew that we and the Franks threw each other gifts,
as well as bombs.
Page 330: We had realized
that they, too, were men whose hearts had been left behind in the fields about
their homes, and after this the war became less holy.
Page 343: [metaphor]
You might as well expect tears from a corpse as alms from an imam
Page 344: If you
are a soldier, you are forced to think about God more than those who are at
home. All around you is death and devastation. You look at a disemboweled body, and you see
that man consists of coils of slime inside, and yet he is smooth and beautiful
on the outside. You look at a body and
you see that it is not a man because the spirit has fled, and so the body does not
fill you with grief. You believe that
God caused every second of your destiny to be written on the fortieth day after
conception, and so you do not complain about hardship and horror, and you know
that every single little thing happens is because God wills it. This is great comfort, knowing that God
carries us in the palm of His hand.
Page 352: I sat
beside him as he smoked, first one
cigarette, and then two, and by the
third cigarette his head was beginning to fall and his eyes close.
… When I realized he was truly dying, I was seized by a certain
curiosity, and I said. “ Fikret, Fikret, can you see the green birds?”
Very slowly and quietly and sadly he said, “There are no
green birds.”
Page 355: It is
quite likely that without Mustafa Kemal the Ottomans would have lost the
campaign at Gallipoli, which would have saved the whole world a great deal of
trouble. There would have been no Russian
Revolution and no Cold War, and the Great War might have ended a year sooner,
but Mustafa Kemal does not believe in saving anyone any trouble, and in Istanbul
he continues to harass the authorities without pity.
Page 369:
[metaphor] If I had as many coins as I have tears, I could but the world
from the Devil
Page 377:
[metaphor] If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that
he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical
truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with
them.
Page 378: [metaphor]
He is like an iron chest full of treasure, and the key has been lost
Page 399: In
Syria, Mustafa Kemal finds that he is in charge of a border that does not
officially exist on any modern maps, since it is defined by ancient and
indefinable border of the Kingdom of Cilicia.
Page 421: When “Turkey”
becomes a word used by Turks, it really means the end of the ulema, the
pan-Islamic dream of Muslim idealists, a fantasy just as fantastic as the Greek
dream of Greater Greece.
Page 424: When he
pooped up from behind a bush, he made me laugh as usual. Then he came out and took my hand and kissed
it and said, “my little bird,” and I
said, Why do you always call me little bird?” and he said, “Because you are delicate and beautiful, and you sing when you
are working, and I have always thought of you as a little bird.”
Page 429: It is
September 17, 1920 and Greece is at war with the Ottoman Turks, taking
advantage of their postwar weakness in the hope of regaining anciently Greek Constantinople
and the western parts of Anatolia. Prime
Minister Venizelos, ambitious on his own account, and ill advised by
irrepressibly unwise Lloyd George, has freshly ordered the Greek army to move
out of its positions in Smyrna, … At the same time, the Turks are beginning to
nurture the vision of a brand new land that will rise full-fledged out of the
embers of the old empire.
Page 430:
[metaphor] For a king hope has fewer feathers than anyone else on earth.
Page 430: Mustafa
Kemal sends a delegation to the London Conference, in tandem with one from the
Istanbul government. The Italians
considerately provide a warship for transport.
The conference is relatively pointless, however, and because the Turks
are demanding Greek withdrawal from Thrace and Anatolia, whereas the Greeks
still think they can win. The Turks make
agreements on the side with the French and the Italians, and only Lloyd George
holds out foe a Greek presence in Anatolia.
From now on, however, the Allies made it known that they will be neutral
in any conflict between Greece and Turkey.
AT the other end of Europe, the Bolshevik Russians agree to supply Kemal
with a stupendous quantity of arms in return for leaving them to occupy
Georgia.
Page 444: Rustem
Bey adding, “When you go back to Italy I doubt if you will be able to carry on
wearing that fez.”
Lieutenant Granitola took it off his head, looked at it,
and then replaced it. “I doubt it
too. It isn’t standard issue in the
army, I believe, and is unlikely to become so.
Even so, I shall wear it in the evenings as I sit in my study and
contemplate, and I shall feel briefly like a Turk.”
Page 447: Mustafa Kemal risks sending in his men in
pursuit of the fleeing Greeks, even though there are intact Greek formations
elsewhere. The attack is successful, and
the Greek 1st and 2ond Corps disintegrate completely. The 3rd Corps in the north, which
has so far stayed out of the fighting, prepares to retreat to Marmara because
it is now vulnerable from the south.
Kemal issues the famous order:
Armies! Your objective is the
Mediterranean, Forward!”
The Turks take thousands of captives, ambushing them as
they descend from the slopes of Mount
Murat. Mustafa Kemal has the
delightfully ironic task of informing the captured General Trikoupis that he
has just received information that the latter has been appointed commander of the
entire Greek front.
It is one of history’s little ironies that in one century
the Greeks should have fought a was of independence against the Turks, and in
the following century the Turks should have fought a war of independence
against the Greeks. In the final battle
of this last war, the Greeks lost 70,000 men, and the Turks, 13,000.
Nurettin Pash summons Archbishop Chrysostom, the
hell-raising cleric who originally got the pasha dismissed from his job in
Smyrna in 1919. He hands the archbishop
over to the Turkish mob, who mutilates him mercilessly until finally a sympathizer
puts him out of his misery and shoots him.
French patrol nearby does nothing to intervene.
Some blame the Turkish regular troops, and others blame
the uncontrollable irregulars who came along for the ride. In other words, everybody has someone else to
blame and to despise for what happened to the fairest and happiest and most
prosperous port of the Levant. In the
and the blame really lies with Venizelos and the Allies, and in particular with
David Lloyd George.
Page 456:
[metaphor] The wind got sown, and here we all are, reaping the whirlwind.
Page 460: History
begins again. The disastrous Lloyd
George falls from power, and Winston Churchill loses office. Mustafa Kemal commences the construction of an
entirely new country. He abolishes the
sultanate, and then the caliphate. He
sets up a secular constitution. He
changes the alphabet from Arabic to Roman, thereby inadvertently ensuring that
almost no future historians will really be able to understand the disordered archives
left over from the Ottoman times. He
establishes equal rights for women, and outlaws both the veil and the fez. He sets up entire industries. He puts in motion events that are planned to
lead to Western-style liberal democracy just as soon as he dies, in which event
he considers that he will automatically lose interest in holding on to personal
power.
Page 461: One day
in Turkey they will call it “The Demographic Catastrophe,” because it is the
Christians who know how to get everything done.
Turks are soldiers and peasants and landowners, but Christians are
merchants and craftsmen. Their loss will
delay economic recovery for decades.
In Greece they call it the “asia Minor Catastrophe.” Those who leave will forever feel that they
have been arbitrarily thrown out of
paradise. One and a half million of them
arrive in Greece, causing the utmost difficulty for a government trying to
accommodate and incorporate them. They
bring with them their education, their sophistication, their talents, their
nostalgia, and a music that will tuen out to be rembetika. They also bring with them their absolute
destitution and sense of injustice, and this will contribute perhaps more than
anything else to a rise of communism in Greece, which will in turn lead to the Greek
civil war.
In Turkey, committees are sent out to all places where
there are Christian communities. Their
job is to assess the value of property so that it can be sent ahead, or its
value reimbursed to the refugees on arrival.
There is no transport provided, however, simply because Turkey has
nothing left after a decade of war, and goods will not arrive. For many of the refugees it turns out to be
yet another death march.
In Eskibahce, they don’t take the arrival of the committee
very seriously. The Turkish and the
Greek Christians there, who have recently had a quiet time on account of the Italian occupation,
feel little bitterness left over from the war with Greece. The still think that they are Ottomans, and
that Mustafa Kemal is a good servant of the Sultan. Many of them still wear turbans, which were
banned absolutely years ago.
The Survivors of
the conflict began to trickle home. The
celebrations that now seem to be occurring almost every day expose an
enevatible undercurrent of terrible sadness.
There are soldiersswho return to find that their mother or father died
years ago, or that they have lost their brothers. The
find the fields overgrown, the animals gone and the houses dilapidated. Families wait in desperate anticipation as the
lapse of time makes it increasingly clear that their sons are lost
forever. The town fills up with
cripples. When Karatavuk returns,
handsome, fully grown, upright, full of confidence and covered in medals, the
joy in Iskander’s house is unbounded.
Nermin cannot stop weeping with relief, and Iskander bursting with
pride, tells his son that he to has had a good war, chasing the brigands with
Rustem Bey. They take Abdul Chrysostomos’s
rifle and go hunting. Kararavuk and his
brother both get a deer, and Iskander misses one. Karatavuk assures him that the ammunition
must have been faulty, and deliberately misses the next target.
Page 467: “Where
is Greece?
“Over the sea. It’s
not far. Don’t worry, you will be looked
after by the Greeks and the Franks. They
will find you new homes, as good as your old one.”
“Are the Greeks Ottomans like us?”
“ No, from now on you are Greeks, not Ottomans. And we are not Ottomans any more either, we
are Turks.”
Page 470: If he had lived three generations later, an
intellectual like Leonidas would have thought of nationalism and religion as the
unholy spouses from whose fetid conjugal bed nothing but evil can crawl forth.
Page 475: There
was one of those moments that sometimes pass between two people, when they look
into each other’s eyes and come instantly to a kind of understanding which is
akin to recognition of oneself in another.
Page 480: When the
committee came to value our property none of us was very concerned. We didn’t
think we would be deported anyway, because we didn’t speak Greek. Only Leonidas Efendi knew Greek, and Father
Kristoforos.
And we said, “We aren’t Greek, we are Ottomans,” and the
committee said, “There’s no such thing as Ottoman any more. If you are a Muslim you’re a Turk. If you’re a Christian and you’re not
Armenian, and you’re from around here, you’re a Greek.”
We said, “We ought to know who we are,” and they just ignored us an carried on
valuing our property.
Page 490: The only
disadvantage was that she would have had to change her religion, but in that
place back then, it never amounted to much for a Christian woman tochange to a
Muslim if she married one. The beliefs
were all mixed up anyway, and sometimes Muslims came to Christians services and
stood in back with their arms folded.
Page 497: he said
that the man who is in love should never marry the one he loves, he should
learn to love the one he marries.
Page 538: The word
“Ottoman” would fall into disuse and disrepute until such time as the inevitable
revisions of later days, when the world would realize that the Ottoman Empire had
been cosmopolitan tolerant.
Page 543: “Indeed” replied Mehment. “It takes a long time, but a long time to us
is a short time to God, and a long way for us is a short was for a bird, if it
has wings.”
Page 544: Rustem
Bey took it in reverently and felt an unfamiliar pang of aesthetic pleasure. It had come out even better than he dreamed of
it. Around the rim, in Arabic test that
he could not read, there was a line from the Koran. In the center, set amid swirling acanthus
leaves, were five beasts. One was an
eagle with two heads growing out of one body, each looking in opposite
directions. Two beasts were identical
geese, breast to breast and paddle, but with their heads flung directly back
over their bodies so they saw that both the world and themselves upside down,
but could not see each other, and two of the were the prettiest and most
elegant antelopes imaginable, identical, both winged, tails that flicked high,
both hoof to hoof and chest to chest.
They might have been sisters, twins of the same dam, but they too were
looking not at each other, but diametrically opposite directions, backwards
over their shoulders.
