On the Shores of the Mediterranean (27 page)

In 1843 he commissioned Karabat Balian, a Turkish-Armenian architect, to build him on the European shore of the Bosphorus
the amazing rococo-style, white marble palace of Dolmabahçe, the Palace of the Filled-in Garden, on a site reclaimed from the Bosphorus by the labours of 16,000 Christian slaves three centuries previously, and before this new development a vegetable garden producing the finest cabbages in the entire Ottoman Empire. And there, when it was finished, richly embellished with chimneypieces of malachite and crimson Bohemian crystal and with a
hamam
with walls of Egyptian alabaster two feet thick, he went to live with his vast court and harem.

To pay for it he raised the money from European moneylenders, ostensibly to re-equip the Turkish Army. This was the first time that a sultan had borrowed money from the West and it was one more nail in the coffin of the Ottoman Empire.

The only survivors of an imperial harem alive today, if any such exist, would be members of the harem of Abd ul-Hamid II, who came to the throne in 1876, was deposed in April 1909, and died, after a period of exile in Salonika, in the Beylerbey Summer Palace on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus in January 1918. Or perhaps they would be survivors of the much smaller harems maintained by his successors, Mehmed V, Mehmed VI and Abd ul-Medjid II, who reigned as caliph only, from 1922 to 1924, when he was sent to exile with the other remaining members of the house of Osman.

Abd ul-Hamid immured himself in various fortified hideaways, some of them subterranean, for more than thirty years, from 1877 to 1909, in the Yildiz Park on the European shore of the Bosphorus. He was the possessor of the last really imperial harem. It numbered three hundred and seventy concubines, the youngest of whom was fifteen years old, and a hundred and twenty-seven eunuchs. The Sultan made modest use of its facilities, preferring the more lively company of a Flora Cordier, a Belgian
modiste
with a shop in Pera, a ‘fair-haired girl with laughing eyes’ who,
when the Sultan asked her to marry him, did so, but of whom he soon tired.

Of these members of his harem, when the time came for him to board the special train taking him to exile in Salonika, he was only allowed to choose to accompany him three
kadins
, four ordinary concubines, four eunuchs and fourteen slaves and other servants, although later, when he became bored with his original selection of concubines, he was allowed to send for reinforcements, as well as for a couple of cows, some angora cats, a collection of fowls and a giant St Bernard dog. At the same time as the Sultan went into exile, thirty-one carriages conveyed the remainder of Abd ul-Hamid’s women to the Harem of the Grand Seraglio at Topkapi.

There, that same year, 1909, an extraordinary spectacle was enacted. The Young Turks, who had deposed him, appalled at the cost of maintaining an entire harem in idleness, caused circulars to be sent out to various parts of the empire, particularly to the Circassian villages in Anatolia, telling their parents to come and reclaim their offspring. As a result, large numbers of Circassian peasants arrived in the capital where they were taken to the Topkapi Palace for what was virtually an identification parade, well described by the writer Francis McCullagh in his book
The Fall of Abd-ul-Hamid:

There, in the presence of a Turkish Commission, they were taken into a long hall filled with the ex-Sultan’s concubines, cadines and odalisques, all of whom were then allowed to unveil themselves for the occasion. The scene that followed was very touching … The contrast between the delicate complexions and costly attire of the women and the rough, weather-beaten appearance of the ill-clad mountaineers who had come to fetch them home was not the least striking feature of the extraordinary scene … The number of
female slaves thus liberated was two hundred and thirteen … Clad in Circassian peasant dress, they are now in all probability milking cows and doing farm work in Anatolia.

This was the end of the last of the great imperial harems. Those whom no one came to claim were sent to other residences, and only a few eunuchs continued to live on at Topkapi until they, too, were evicted in 1924, when parts of the palace became a museum.

For years no proper plan of the entire palace existed, or if it did it was never published, and it was not until 1918 that two Americans, Dr Barnette Miller and Professor Lucius Scipio, an engineer, began a survey of it, assisted by Izzat Bey, a palace functionary, an
Iç-oghlan
who had been educated in the Military School of State which was abolished, together with the Sultanate, in 1922. They were not allowed to use surveying instruments because the custodians – Mehmed VI, the last sultan, was still on the throne – regarded them as sacrilegious, and they were therefore forced to pace out all their measurements.

The survey was only completed in October 1918, by which time the Turkish armies were crumbling on every front and Constantinople was being constantly attacked by huge British bombers. How strange it must have been, pacing out the dimensions of an empty harem, in a twilight world that was already no more, with an entire empire collapsing outside the walls.

It was not until 1971 that a number of rooms in the Winter Harem were opened, wonderfully restored by a Turkish architect, Madame Emine Mualla Eyuboglu, a task that had taken, working with four or five master craftsmen and some twenty assistants, eleven years. The work is still continuing.

But wherever one finds oneself in the Winter Harem, whether in a part of it that has been restored, or in a room the windows
of which have not been opened for perhaps a hundred and thirty years, it is difficult, even with the aid of the most vivid imagination, to populate it with anything except a few isolated ghosts. It is as if all those inhabitants who made up the great hierarchical pyramid, of which the Sultan and the Sultan Validé, and the Chief Black Eunuch, were the apex, had not only gone for ever, but had never existed, in this, the last great extant palace where Europe ends and Asia begins.

In wanting to revisit the plain of Troy we were only following countless others whose imagination had been excited by the stirring and often dreadful deeds that were done at Homer’s Troy. Indeed at one time, when the memories of what had occurred must have been comparatively fresh, it became almost obligatory for the illustrious great to make the pilgrimage, though for all but them and their attendants, the Troad was too remote and difficult of access. This has remained true throughout the ages so that even far into the nineteenth century only the most determined travellers went there. More historians and geographers wrote of it than ever visited it, although Herodotus, ‘the Father of History’, in the fifth century BC, Scylax of Caryanda in the
fourth century BC and Strabo, who was still writing in AD 21, had probably all been there.

The first of these illustrious persons known to have paid his respects to the Homeric dead was Xerxes, in the fifth century BC. Having seen his army safely across the Hellespont, he journeyed to Troy, where he sacrificed 1000 oxen and offered a great quantity of wine, of which large amounts were probably being produced on the Asian shore of the Hellespont even at this early date, just as they are to this day.

Some hundred years later, Alexander, first of his army to set foot in Asia, lost no time in continuing his propitiatory observances. No sooner was he safely ashore than he caused yet another altar to Zeus, Athena and also this time to Heracles, to be erected above the Hellespont, before proceeding inland to Troy. There, he made further offerings: to Athena, as patron goddess of the city; to King Priam on the altar of Zeus in one of his other roles as Patron of Households. At the temple of Athena he exchanged his weapons and armour for similar equipment reputed to be left over from the Trojan War, and which still hung there in the city. Thereafter these trophies are said to have preceded him wherever he advanced into battle, borne by his household troops. At Troy, too, he was crowned with gold by his sailing master, Menoetius, as well as by Chares, an Athenian inhabitant of Sigeum, a city only a mile or two southwards along the Aegean shore from the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus.

But what caught the imagination of the classical world more than this was Alexander’s gesture in laying a wreath on the tomb of Achilles itself, naming him a lucky man to have Homer as chronicler of his deeds, then running a course round the tumulus without clothes on, while at the same time his favourite, Hephaestion, performed similar obsequies at the tomb of Patroclus, which seems to suggest that even then those already long-dead heroes were thought to have been buried separately.

More than five centuries after Alexander had paid what proved to be his last respects to Achilles, the beastly Roman emperor Caracalla, who reigned from AD 211–17, emulated his distinguished predecessor, while en route with his army from the Danube to Antioch, but in a more extravagant, less dignified fashion. Imagining himself to be Achilles reborn, presumably in some sort of frenzy, for he was apparently convinced that it was Patroclus’s funeral he was attending, he bedecked the tomb of Patroclus with floral tributes and then, having ordered a hecatomb of animals as a burnt offering, added as an afterthought, to provide a visible substitute, the body of his favourite, the freed slave, Festus, who, it is said, he ordered to be slaughtered for this purpose. As a final gesture of extravagance, when the sacrificial fire was drawing nicely, Caracalla threw in, to the amusement of the onlookers, which they no doubt prudently kept under control, a lock of his own hair (with which he was already ill-provided, although he was only twenty-seven). He, too, then ran round the tumulus with nothing on, followed by his suite. His last act in the Troad was to erect a bronze statue of Achilles on Cape Sigeum. Two years later he was assassinated in northern Mesopotamia.

With such a comparative wealth of information available, it is strange that Schliemann should have identified the tomb of Festus as being within the tumulus of Uvecik, the biggest of all the Trojan tumuli, which lies some six miles south of those of Achilles and Patroclus, although when he excavated it he found nothing to support this belief; but perhaps it was no more random than its previous identification as the tomb of Aesyetes, whoever he may have been, by Jean-Baptiste Lechevalier, author of
Voyage de la Troade
, published in 1802, the first man, having begun his researches in 1785, to engage in archaeological exploration in the modern sense, as opposed to mere delving, in the Troad. It was he who constructed an attractively acceptable theory concerning
the whereabouts of Homeric Troy, perching it on an eminence known as the Balli Dag, a much more impressive situation in many ways than the one that is now generally accepted. Certainly it cannot have caused greater surprise than that felt by Julius Caesar when, chasing Pompey through Asia Minor, he found himself high above the plain on the Balli Dag – the Hill of Honey, near the village of Pinabarsi, so called because bees live in a crack in the rock there – and, wading through the long grass that covered it, received a rebuke from one of the local inhabitants to the effect that did he not know that he was treading on the ghost of Hector. He was lucky not to have disturbed that of Priam as well. What was sometimes alleged to be Priam’s tumulus is next to it, and that of another of his sons, Troilus, is some way off to the north, on a hill called the Khana Tepe.

We set out again from Istanbul and travelled to the mound of Hisarlik, which all but the most niggling consider to conceal the site of ancient Troy, in the same taxi and with the same driver who had made such a fuss about Gallipoli. Nearby is the village of Hisarlik, which did not exist until about 1865 when some Circassians built a few miserable habitations in what was largely a fever-ridden swamp, using stones taken from Schliemann’s excavations. Now it is a place with a large mosque.

It was so early when we got there that the site was still locked up – no custodians in view, no savage dogs, the curse of the Mediterranean lands and everywhere else.

Knowing that we would be unlikely to pass this way again we scaled a wire fence with the aid of an old packing case that was lying about and fell into a compound in which the principal feature was a wooden horse even larger than I had imagined the original to be. It looked as if it would be more at home in some dim, northern forest than down here only about three and a half
miles from the place where Agamemnon’s Greeks had landed, and it had portholes cut in its flanks so that visitors could be photographed waving from its entrails. And down below it, outside what was called the
Casino Helen and Paris
, there was a genuine replica of a Trojan chariot in which, before being snapped inside the horse, one could be taken holding aloft a shield and brandishing a sword.

The
Casino
was not really a casino in the Mediterranean sense of the word, that is to say it was neither a gambling joint nor a brothel. Instead it sold souvenirs and picture postcards and offered refreshments including ‘Trojan Wine’ which, after something like 3200 years in bottle, might have been expected to have gone off a bit. In fact, this wine comes from the vineyards on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles around Canakkale.

But in spite of all this tripe Troy and its environs was worth coming to see. Up on the mound, myriads of dark poppies, gladioli and other wild flowers flourished, and the wind that set the tall grass waving and bowing and sighed among the branches of the evergreen oaks and olives was of a less ferocious temper than that which was currently droning over eastern Thrace. Here, in the Troad, spring was already well-established.

Below the mound the Trojan plain stretched away to the Aegean. In it there were fields of maize, wheat that was already golden, and what would later be crops of cotton, in which women with their heads done up in white cloths were bent double weeding; and on the banks of the Scamander, where black poplars and willows grew, and along the edges of the irrigation ditches, shepherds trailed behind their flocks that were nibbling their way so slowly that watching them advance was like watching the hour hand of a clock on the move. It was a timeless scene, one that might have been enacted, apart perhaps from the cultivation of the cotton, a thousand, two thousand, years previously.

It had to be Troy. Even if the mound was not much more than a pimple on the plain compared with the other contender for the honour of concealing within it Homer’s Troy, which is Balli Dag, even though Homer described the hill of Troy as ‘beetling’, ‘lofty’ and ‘windy’; and even though the Balli Dag is twice the height of the mound at Hisarlik and
is
beetling and windy. But it is also seven miles from the sea, and there is no suitable ground for the chariot racing that Homer wrote about anywhere near it.

It had to be Troy because, as Edward Daniel Clarke wrote, while visiting the Troad in 1801 after his adventures in the Summer Harem, ‘we stand with Strabo upon the very spot whence he deduced his observations concerning other objects in the district, looking down upon the
Simoïsian Plain
and viewing in front of the
city
[he is as free with his italics as Queen Victoria with her underlinings], one flowing towards Sigeum, the other towards Rhoeteum, precisely as he described them.’

Unfortunately, when Schliemann appeared on the scene in the 1880s, he came to the conclusion that Clarke had had the audacity to identify the site as that of Homeric Troy, whereas in fact all Clarke had done was identify Novum Ilium, founded in the seventh century BC on the site of it. As a result Clarke was landed, albeit in the tomb, with an erroneous attribution for which Schliemann never made amends, in spite of he himself having been proved wrong in thinking that what he had discovered was Homeric Troy. It was all very unpleasant but no more than one expects of savants once they have tasted one another’s blood.

It
had
to be Troy, I felt, knowing nothing about it, completely ignorant but swayed by instinct, looking down into the mound through level after unexplained level – there are said to be forty-six different strata, excavated and cut through by innumerable archaeologists – unexplained because, mercifully, there was no one to do any explaining. I wondered vaguely whether the
particular one we were looking at, which contained what looked like mussel shells, was the one that also contained the remains of Priam’s bronze age city.

If only I had had with me a copy of
The American Journal of Archaeology
, XXXIX (1935), II, required reading on this subject, I would perhaps have been able to find the answer, which was more than I could armed with photostats of the relevant pages of four useful guide books I had consulted before leaving home.

Reading these extracts on site I felt my mind reeling. Fodor’s
Turkey
said that Troy I, the oldest and deepest down, was ‘a vestige of some 3500 years ago’; the
Guide Bleu, Turquie
, that it was founded in 3500 BC, but gave no indication as to when it might have gone into disuse;
Turkey, The Traveller’s Guide
said it flourished from 3000–2500 BC; and
The Companion Guide to Turkey
that it flourished from 3000–1800 BC.

For Troy VI, which some identified as Priam’s Troy, all gave 1800 BC, except Fodor, which gave 1900 BC, as the opening date. In Troy VII things became really difficult. The
Guide Bleu
didn’t mention it at all. Fodor said 1300–900 BC,
The Traveller’s Guide
gave 1275–1100 BC,
The Companion Guide
, 1300–1100 BC,
The Traveller’s Guide
also said that Troy VII was destroyed by fire in 1240 BC.

There was also Troy VIIA, which, according to a Professor Blegen of the University of Cincinnati, was the city of Priam, destroyed by an earthquake about 1260 BC, perhaps the same earthquake which, according to
The Traveller’s Guide
, destroyed Troy VI in 1275 BC and, according to Fodor, destroyed Troy VIIA in 1200 BC. There was no mention of VIIA in any of the other three guides, but
The Companion Guide
came up with a cunning postscript to the effect that Turkish archaeologists disagree with most of the foregoing and have consigned Priam’s Troy to somewhere in the sub-basement of Troy VI, and that all the signposts
on site are labelled accordingly, whether you like it or not. By which time I was beginning to feel like throwing myself down a Trojan elevator shaft.

After this it was a relief to go off and look at parts of Troy, or whatever it was, that were still more or less standing, as
The Companion Guide
, the most palatable work, advised one to do: to the House of Pillars to pretend that it was Priam’s Palace, and to the South Gate to pretend that this was the Scaean Gate, to which Helen rushed down to watch Paris, who came off worst, fight a duel with her husband Menelaus.

Seeing us up on the mound, silhouetted against the rising sun, some of the country people working in the neighbouring fields began to converge on the base of it, where the wire fence makes further advances difficult, crying
‘Kainz! Kainz!’
and, as they had for Clarke, 180 years or so previously, produced from recesses in their everyday, ragged working garments rather more worn and indistinct examples of the medals that had given him the necessary boost to identify the site of Novum Ilium. Soon we were doing a brisk, illicit business through the fence, confident that no modern copies could possibly be manufactured at the prices that were being asked. It looked like visiting day at a prison.

By the time we were ready to leave the site it was officially open, and at the
Casino
we bought a copy of
Greek Coins in Canakkale
, by Tayan Sevil, Archaeologist, in the hope of identifying our newly acquired loot, most of which looked as if it had been left on a railroad track and run over by a series of trains. This book, which cost 30 Turkish lira, was translated by a Mr Hasan Ediz.