In Xanadu (16 page)

When the lesson broke up, it was not yet dark, so I walked back behind the citadel to have a look at the Gok
medresse.
The college is only three hundred yards from the Ulu Jami, and was built less than one hundred years later, but a remarkable renaissance separates the two buildings. The restraint and dignity of the Ulu Jami gives way to an almost baroque richness of decoration. Nothing I had seen before in Islam prepared me for the sight. In the Islamic Art Museum in Istanbul I had walked around the collection of Seljuk
art mobilier
and I remembered thinking how ungainly it seemed: large pregnant-looking ewers, spiky candlesticks with stems like kebab skewers, a set of heavy brass mortars, lumpy with large protruding knobs. The pottery was repetitive and unattractive, and its figure work lacked precision, either in line or in colouring. Even the famous fourteenth-century wooden mosque doors from Konya failed to impress: they were pretty, like Iznik tile work, but were somehow tame, predictable.

The sculpture on the front of the Gok
medresse
was in a different class. It was wild, frenetic and restless - nomad sculpture; a star-burst of interlace and pattern sweeping out from the stalactite archway. Struggling out of two dimensions into three, the tendrils would suddenly empt into high relief; jungles of acanthus and vine swirled, thrashed and clung. The sculptor was driven by the same decorative urge and
horror vacui
that motivated Anglo-Saxon artists, but here it produced sculpture at once more violent and barbaric than any Celtic decorative work. Commissioned in 1271, when the Mongols were threatening to swamp the Seljuks, this was the art of a people under siege, of a culture revitalized by the threat of extinction.

Whether there was more sculpture of this quality inside the
medresse,
it is now impossible to say. Most of the college was burned to the ground in August 1400, when Timur the Lame (the Tamberlaine 'scourge of God' in Marlowe) fell on Sivas and captured it after a week's siege. What happened then is unclear. According to
The Life of Timur,
a gallant attempt to whitewash the actions of one of the most unpleasant mass murderers in history, he spared the life of the Muslims in Sivas, and simply put to death the Christians, whose Sipahi cavalry had put up the most stubborn resistance.
The Life of Timur
is not, however, the most reliable of documents, as its subtitle (in the 1597 edition: 'A rare example of heathenish piety, prudence, magnanimity, mercy, liberality, humility, justice, temperance and valour') might lead one to suspect.

The Armenian historian, Thomas of Metsope, seems to have given a more factual account. According to Thomas, on the first approach of Timur's army the people of Sivas sued for peace by gathering the Muslim children of the city in the plain in front of the city walls, each one bearing a copy of the Koran. Timur, who was not unaware of the attractions of little boys, was no doubt moved by the sight, but that did not stop him ordering that the children be trampled to death under the hooves of his heavy cavalry. He besieged the city for a week, mined the walls then stormed the breeches. The four thousand defenders who survived the ensuing slaughter were divided among his tumans (generals), and buried alive in specially dug pits. No less than nine thousand virgins (of both sexes) were carried off for the Imperial harem. Sivas was burned, and left empty.

The reason for all this, according to the
Life,
was Timur's problem with boredom. As he headed home to Samarcand along the shore of the Caspian, he passed his time, says the
Life,
'in hunting and hawking, in order to try and make the journey a little less tedious....'

Mr Orhan Ghazi (Prop., Manager and Rm. Service, Hotel Seljuk) woke us the following morning bearing not only our breakfast (comb honey) and two buckets of hot water, but also the good news that our Chevrolet was waiting.

After getting back from the Gok
medresse
the previous evening I had done some research. With the aid of an earnest engineering student (who spoke English) and a semi-subterranean
cay
shop full of old men (who did not), I had managed to establish that whatever was the case in Polo's time, there were no longer any Greeks or Armenians in Sivas. According to the old men they had all 'left' during the First World War (i.e. they had all been slaughtered during the 1917 massacres) and since then their churches had fallen into disrepair, and eventually had been swept away. The one near the citadel, probably the Armenian church of St Blaise, had been used as an army store, and when the roof fell in in 1953 it had been destroyed. The

oi her, presumably the Greek church of St George, was knocked down in 1978 and its stones had been used to build a mosque. Both sites were now covered with blocks of flats. No one knew anything about the shrine of St Blaise which used to occupy a site on the citadel near the Gok
medresse,
but if it had not been desecrated before it must have been destroyed when the top of the citadel mount was bulldozed to make a park in the late 1960s. On one thing everyone was agreed: there was now no church in Sivas, no priest, and with the exception of one alcoholic Armenian tailor, no Christians. But according to the old men in the
cay
shop, carpet production had survived, not in Sivas itself but in the villages to the south of it, and for the price of a taxi ride from Chelsea to Piccadilly, a chauffeur-driven gangster car was mine for the day to go and look for it.

Mr Orhan Ghazi had already briefed the driver when we appeared at the doors of his hotel with our notebooks and cameras, and he saw us into the magnificent limousine with another of his Abyssinian bows. We sat dwarfed in the leather acreage of the back seat, sauntering slowly through the streets of Sivas, threading our way through herds of sheep and goats, pas the shuffling sacks and their husbands, queueing up behind slow-moving processions of Geordie-crammed
dolmus
(minibuses). As we left the bazaar we narrowly avoided a collision with a cavalcade of cars going in the opposite direction. They honked their horns, and trailed bunting and streamers. They were returning, if I understand correctly the gestures of our driver, not from a wedding, but a circumcision: a great cause for celebration if you are a Turk (or rather for your friends and relations; less so, at least initially, for you yourself).

Then we left the shady avenues of cypress and were out in the strong white light and bleached flatlands of the Anatolian plateau.

I knew this landscape. For one month the previous summer I had trekked through it, following the route of the First Crusade, and I knew how soon the eyes tired of its great wide solitudes. It was not yet a desert; it was still intermittently, grudgingly fertile. Every so often you would pass a single, lonely farm with its cones of dung chapattis and whitewashed mud-brick byres. But then the sudden burst of colour would give way again to the monochrome plains and the road would stretch on, unwaveringly straight, into the dry heart of Asia Minor.

This plateau had once been the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, a kind of Imperial prairie, and its prosperous farms had for a millenium provided the backbone of the Byzantine army: the free peasant small-holders who had made up the regiments of
caballarii.
But when the pastoralist Turks swept into Asia Minor in the 1070s they left the fields unfilled, and soon the irrigation systems broke down and the land dried up and salinated. When the armies of the First Crusade marched through Turkey only twenty years after Manzikert, they found that many of the Empire's most fertile
theme
(provinces) were already waste. In twenty years the Turks had killed the land.

We stopped at the oasis village of Sultanhani. After an hour of deadening plains it seemed a fine place. There were some new bungalows, some ancient mud-brick farms with walled gardens, several smart new tractors and a small filling station. Beside the filling station was a pond, with ducks paddling around in a sludge of old dogweed. At our approach two geese waddled off with the self-important swagger of a pair of portly Whig landowners. There was a slight scent of vegetation.

We sat outside a teahouse and drank some
cay
while the driver sucked at a
nargile.
Nearby were two policemen who looked grateful, in their boredom, to have something to be suspicious about. One, all peak cap and bristling moustache, possessed an air of casual brutality; the other, a smaller man, had the sad face of a First World War daguerrotype; he might have been a Balkan general or a Tsarist armament minister. They eyed us up and down, but it was too hot to be overly curious, and they soon returned to their game of cards.

We wandered over to the
han
which gave the village its name. According to an inscription, it was commissioned in 1230 by the Seljuk Sultan Keykubad I. It was a royal foundation, deliberately built to make any other caravanserai look small and provincial: a totally unembarrassed public demonstration of royal taste and, more importantly, royal wealth,

A broken-toothed ruffian sat at the gate by a rickety trestle.

'Good morning, Ingliz,' he said, inclining his head. 'Three hundred lira. Each.'

We payed the first entrance fee we had been charged since Jerusalem and the last until Peking.

The court of
the
han
was larger than those of most Oxbridge colleges. On one side the dormitories, baths and bedrooms led off from the courtyard; on the other there were workshops, stores and a kitchen. At the far end a huge emblazoned gateway gave off into the stables, a vaulted cathedral with stalls on ether side of its nave, impossibly large and grand for any except a race of nomads whose wealth and status depended on horsemanship. The plan was exactly that of the
medresse
in Sivas. Here were a practical people, only newly come to erecting buildings any more substantial than a nomad's tent. In the earlier
medresse
at Sivas, they had adapted to their needs a building plan (of ancient, probably Sassanian origin) and, that perfected, they saw no need to adapt it any further. It was a good plan, they seem to have thought, why bother to change it? Thus all Seljuk buildings surviving from this period share an endearing sameness. Their hotels look like their mental hospitals, their mosques like their stables; the exteriors of their schools barely differ from some of their castles and their minarets can be mistaken for burial towers.

Only in several minor details does the Sultanhani
han
diverge from the model of the Sivas
medresse.
The walls were made taller, thicker and more substantial, so as to be able to
w
ithstand the raids of bandits or Turcomen. The
han
gateway was made stronger and more imposing. Buttresses were added, as were lion's-head corbels, decoration perhaps thought unsuitable on the more serious walls of a religious college. A slatted cone the shape of a
yurt
was added onto the top of the stables to catch light for the horses. And most inspired of all, as if to offset the added bulk of the fortified walls, in the middle of the courtyard was raised a
mescat,
a floating pavilion-mosque of fabulous intricacy, suspended, as if levitated, on four delicate arches of apricot-coloured stone, as lightly and subtly carved as an inlaid jewel box.