On the Shores of the Mediterranean (30 page)

‘Come to the Mediterranean for vinter sunshine,’ Wanda said.

Night fell unnaturally early because of the weather and all we could see in the light of the headlamps or when the lightning flashed, momentarily illuminating the Mediterranean crashing on the rocks below, were the snowflakes hurtling towards the windscreen like tracer bullets. One particularly powerful discharge lit up a couple of ghostly-looking castles, one on a headland, the other standing in what looked like an inlet of the sea offshore. These were the Corcyrian Castles, built in 1151 by the Rubenids, an Armenian dynasty who founded a Christian kingdom in Cilicia and married their daughters to the rulers of Crusader kingdoms in the Levant, which was extinguished in 1375 by the Karamanoglu Turks who took Konya from the Seljuks.

We spent the night at Mersin, and early the following morning followed the road through the Cilician Plain, the principal city of which is Adana, the fourth most populous city in Turkey, where we did not linger either. The plain is really a large delta created by the silt brought down from the Taurus by three rivers, all of them more famous by the names bestowed on them in antiquity than they are today. All of them, like the Po, are wayward and capricious, forming new estuaries just as the local pilots had learned their way about the earlier ones, forming large lagoons which teemed with fish, swans, pelicans, geese, duck and turtles which they then equally capriciously obliterated at the moment
when the local inhabitants, having pondered the idea, perhaps for centuries, of fishing in them, had finally built themselves flat-bottomed boats, but leaving behind just enough water to turn them into malaria-ridden swamps inhabited by innumerable frogs whose incessant croaking ensured, even if the mosquitoes failed to make their presence felt, that no one got a decent night’s sleep in these parts of the Cilician Plain.

The first of these rivers, the Cydnus – the other two are the ancient Sarus, now the Seyhan, and the Pyramus, now the Ceghan – flows through the outskirts of the town of Tarsus. Although it is a very pretty river above the town, where there is a series of waterfalls, here, where the main Mersin – Adana highway crossed it, it was difficult with snow falling intermittently to think of this as one of the arcadian reaches of a river up which Cleopatra, dressed as Aphrodite, a bit one imagines like Diana Cooper at her best, but darker, floated in her purple-sailed galley on her way to lay Mark Antony in the aisles at Tarsus in the autumn of 41 BC, fanned by what Plutarch described as ‘pretty boys bedight like cupids’ and propelled by oarsmen who pulled together on silver oars, encouraged not by the whistle of the lash descending on their backs but by the sound of pipes and harps and flutes; a spectacle that would have given St Paul, who was a native of Tarsus and spent the first fourteen years of his life here before being sent to study in Jerusalem, something to write about if he had only been born a century or so earlier.

Travelling through what to anyone brought up in England would seem like the endless expanses of what is known as the Cukurova, the Sunken Plain, but to a North American or a Russian would be more like a large back garden, seeing flocks of sheep and herds of goats nibbling their way along the verges of the dead straight road, seeing an occasional grass-grown tumulus housing the remains of some long-forgotten king or chieftain, rising from
the endless cotton fields and here and there a small village, or a bigger one with a mosque and minaret, standing at the foot of the Misis Dagh, the miniature mountain range to the south of the road that separates the Sunken Plain from the Gulf of Iskenderun, it was difficult to believe that as long ago as 1500 BC, when it was occupied by the Hittites,
¹
this was one of the most populous regions of Anatolia. And it continued to be so until fever and malaria, which have been such a scourge almost until the present day, brought about its depopulation. Now, once more efficiently irrigated with the help of concrete aqueducts which stretch out in every direction across the plain, it has become prosperous again, its fertile soil yielding enormous crops of citrus fruits and cotton.

At Toprakkale, about forty miles east of Adana, a village which takes its name from a nearby Byzantine castle, the E5, a road which begins at Calais, turns sharp right for Iskenderun and Antakya, beyond which, at Yaylodagi, where it ceases to be the E5, it crosses out of Turkey en route for Latakia in Syria, and beyond that for Tripoli in Lebanon. If you go straight on at Toprakkale without turning right you end up at Mosul in Iraq. Both roads are awful; infested with great stinking lorries and Turkish traffic police who set up road blocks all along them to harass their drivers, some of whom can do with a bit of harassment.

By now there was a lull in the bad weather. The black clouds had rolled away seawards, taking with them their loads of snow, which they were now probably dropping in the Mediterranean and on Cyprus in the form of rain, and although they were still thick and threatening over the Taurus, here in the plain the sun shone down from a cloudless sky.

A mile or so south of Toprakkale the road passed through a gap in what in the south-western USA would be described as a
mesa
, a steep-sided, flat-topped escarpment in this case composed of rocks and earth and shingle which looked as if it might have been thrown up by some colossal flash flood. Here, we left the Cilician Plain and entered the Plain of Issus.

It was a romantic spot, at any rate for anyone with a spark of romance in their make-up. Above us on a mound loomed Toprakkale, a castle built by the Byzantine Emperor, Nicephorus II Phocas, in AD 969 on his way to take Antioch. He failed to take it but it later fell to his successor, John I Zimisces, who murdered him, or caused him to be murdered, that same year when he returned to Constantinople, and it remained in Byzantine hands, together with a large part of the Syrian coast, for more than a hundred years. His partner in crime, Theofano, described by Gibbon as ‘a woman of base origin, masculine spirit and flagitious manners’, besides helping Zimisces, who was her lover, to murder her second husband Nicephorus, poisoned two emperors, the first of whom was her father-in-law, Constantine VII, the second his son, her first husband, Romanus II. Later, Zimisces himself was also poisoned, but not, it is thought, by Theofano.

To the north was the escarpment we had just driven through, which together with the Misis Dagh, the miniature range to the west, effectively isolated the Plain of Issus from the Cilician Plain. To the east were the steep-sided Amanus Mountains, now white with snow, running away south in a great curve towards the Gulf of Iskenderun. And to the south was the Plain itself with the railway line from Toprakkale to Iskenderun running through it for some thirty miles, with the remains of an aqueduct built by the Seleucids dark against the sun, running out westwards from the railway line through the flat fields to what remained of the Seleucid city of Epiphania, founded in about 175 BC by Antiochus
the Mad, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who was, in spite of his title, the most brilliant of the Seleucid kings, one of a royal dynasty (364–312 BC) that at the height of its power ruled over an area extending from Thrace to India. And beyond that there were the glittering waters of the Gulf, glimpsed between the sand dunes. Dunes over which, in 401 BC, the 20,000 Asian and Greek mercenaries of Cyrus, younger brother of the recently enthroned King of Persia, Artaxerxes II, had tramped on what was to be one of the greatest marches in the history of the world, one which, in its later stages, when the 20,000 had been reduced to 10,000 Greeks, after Cyrus had been defeated and killed at Cunaxa, near Babylon, had become the March of the Ten Thousand, a journey of discovery through regions unknown to the Persians themselves. And this route through the dunes was the one followed by the right flank of Alexander’s army at the end of October 333 BC, on its way from Mallus (now Karataş), a coastal city of the Cilician Plain, to the Syrian Gates.

And here in the plain, at the beginning of November, 333 BC, after a series of marches and counter marches, Alexander joined battle with the army of Darius III Condoman. The battle took place on the banks of a river that it has been the pleasure and despair of
savants
to attempt to identify – there are three rivers and five streams for them to choose from that flow down from the Amanus Mountains into the Gulf of Iskenderun – across which the opposing armies now faced one another on an approximately one-and-a-half-mile front between the mountains and the sea, Alexander’s Macedonians numbering between 25,000 and 35,000, the infantry in a long line with his Shield Bearers on the right flank, the Foot Companions in the centre and his foreign mercenaries on the left, the seaward side, with the cavalry on both flanks. The army of Darius, probably a superior force in numbers, consisted of Persian archers, Greek mercenaries of various sorts,
light and heavy cavalry and infantry and oriental slingers. Medes, Armenians, Hyrcanians, North Africans as well as Persians were some of the troops which the last of the Persian kings assembled and counted at Babylon when the news of Alexander’s irruption into Cilicia became known.

The battle began on the afternoon of 1 November with both sides moving to the attack and meeting in head-on collision in and on both sides of the river, which Darius had fortified with palisades. On the Greek right, below the mountains, the Persian archers, light infantry and cavalry, gave way before Alexander’s horse, the Companion Cavalry, the Thessalians and the Lancers, who then turned left and drove into the Persian centre, taking the foot soldiers, the tough Greek mercenaries of Darius, who were heavily engaged with Alexander’s Foot Companions, in the rear.

Meanwhile Darius had put in a massive cavalry attack on his right down on the seashore. It failed and his cavalry, as were those on his left, were thrown back on the centre, causing indescribable confusion, although the actual centre front where his mercenaries had had to fall back was still intact.

By this time night was falling. Believing the battle lost, Darius fled the field in his chariot, leaving his brother, Oxathres, and his nobles to carry on the struggle, until the time came when the Persians and their truly heroic Greek mercenaries broke and scattered.

It was a great cavalry victory and Alexander was magnanimous, sparing Oxathres and the nobles, sparing the wife, mother and children of Darius, treating them with great honour. Later he married Darius’s daughter.

By defeating Darius, Alexander had opened up the
Pylae Syriae
, the Syrian Gates, otherwise the Beilon Pass, across the Amanus Mountains to Antioch and the Plains of Syria; the route which would take him and his army to Egypt, then into Asia as far as
the borders of China and Tibet, as conqueror of the world. Here on the banks of the river he erected, as was his custom, temples to Zeus, Athena and Heracles and down on the shore the first of the cities he was to build to commemorate his victories and his name was erected on the site of what is now Iskenderun.

In the Plain of Issus, in a sandy waste below Toprakkale Castle, there was a Yürük encampment. As it was impossible to reach it with anything but a four-wheel-drive vehicle, the three of us, the third member of the party being a Turkish girl with whom we had previously travelled extensively in other parts of Turkey, set off on foot to visit it. The wind was bitter from the north and in the hollows there were little drifts of snow.

It is never easy to approach a nomad encampment unless accompanied by a member of the tribe or clan because of the appalling ferocity of their guard dogs. In the not-so-distant past, when the majority of travellers in such outlandish places as the one in which we now found ourselves were armed, they often only saved themselves from being torn to pieces by shooting their attackers dead.

The dogs in this encampment were no exception. While we were still a hundred yards or more away half a dozen of them, pale-coloured brutes with manes, having instantly identified us as strangers and therefore a potential danger to the community, came racing out towards us uttering the most blood-curdling roaring noises. Then, as no one in the camp showed any inclination to call them off, we turned and fled for the shelter of the car, just reaching it in time to get in and slam the doors on ourselves before they arrived and began to rage up and down, looking like miniature lions. And there we sat, wondering what to do next.

Fortunately, as in a play in which no time can be wasted, a middle-aged Yürük appeared, driving a pony cart from the
direction of Toprakkale village, where he had been selling yoghourt which the Yürüks are considerable artists at preparing. He uttered a single word and the dogs became as good as gold; another and they all six went loping off back to the camp.

Most of the male Yürüks we had seen in Turkey, apart from the one at Alarahan, had been picturesque figures, often dressed entirely from head to foot in materials spun and woven from the wool of their own animals, even their shoes sometimes being made from the skins of their own goats. This one was a bit of a disappointment. He was wearing what was now the almost universal male uniform of rural Turkey – the shiny black suit, the black peaked cap, the white shirt, in this case made of nylon – an outfit that, apart from the fact that he was wearing scuffed black loafers, made him look a bit like an off-duty mute at the Rampe del Campo in Naples.

‘You did well,’ he said, when Ince, our Turkish friend, told him what had happened, ‘to reach your
arabiyeh
[the picturesque word in Turkish for motor car]. If you had not done so at least one of you would probably now be dead.’

And he invited us to accompany him, which we did, following his cart on foot as it lurched through the scrub, a by-now-rather-apprehensive little party of visitors.

The encampment consisted of half a dozen goat-hair tents, some of them covered with plastic sheeting as a further protection against the dreadful wind which was howling about them and each with its guard dog now sitting primly in front of it. There were some enclosures made with thorn bushes for the sheep and goats, which were somewhere out in the plain with whoever was looking after them, a couple of large pens fenced with cane, full of young lambs, some hobbled horses and a tank on wheels which provided drinking water for the community.