The Fracture Zone (22 page)

This was where the sultans’ obsession with tulips began. More than eight hundred varieties were listed in an Ottoman flower book, and one grand vizier who bred the flowers created forty-four new varieties. This is where the house cooks made dishes of eccentric specificity—stuffed fish in which not single lesion could appear on even a single scale, and confections that used only the left legs of animals, the sultanly chefs believing that since the animals invariably favored use of the right, these limbs would prove indelicately tougher, the left ones tenderer.

On the terrace of a
yali
you could sit and watch the boats go by, or the young giggling children diving endlessly into the cool and deep waters, and while doing so you could sip tamarind juice, or dip your fingers in grape treacle, and one tale had it that you could order a particular red jam containing, along with the rose petals and Circassian strawberries and cherries from Giresun,
^*
tiny amounts of finely crushed rubies.

It is in such a wooden house, on the fashionable spur of Yenikoy, that Dr. Lucius now has his office, and from where he can ruminate on past events, if he cares to, and in an atmosphere of great imagined charm. The mansion, white and cool and sprawling in a broad seaside meadow, was built for an Armenian banker and then handed in 1884 as a personal gift to the old boiled-beef eater, Franz Josef, by the Sultan Abdülham
d II. (It cannot be demolished: The few wooden
yali
left in today’s Istanbul are preserved by government fiat, and can only be moved, never torn down.)

When I first met Dr. Lucius I was struck by the odd symmetry
of the occasion: It was droll, I thought, that at the end of the journey I would be meeting an Austrian with tweeds and spectacles and a dryly sardonic academic manner and who was in interests and demeanor just like Dr. Düriegl, the director of the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, where I had begun this journey. And like Dr. Düriegl, he too was fascinated by the tale of Kara Mustafa Pasha, the grand vizier at the time of Sultan Mehmet IV. When I mentioned the name he drew in a rapid breath. “Ah, yes—that difficult old devil!”

The diplomatic fuss over the remains of Kara Mustafa continues. The head is in Vienna, the body in a village called Merzifon, northeast of Ankara, close to the southern shore of the Black Sea. Dr. Lucius had only that morning been helping to organize a symposium, due to be staged in Merzifon itself, on the life and times of Kara Mustafa, and he was helping to arrange for Austrian speakers to come and talk about the strategy behind the unhappy siege. No doubt, he said, given the passions felt by so many Turks, the incoming Austrian academics would have a trying time. No doubt there would once again be pleas, demands, perhaps even diplomatic insistence, that the head be sent back, to be buried next to the body to which it belonged. (Or was
thought
to belong. When I suggested DNA testing of the two sets of remains, to see if a match was likely, all the scholars involved in the debate showed themselves to be happily detached from reality by confessing they had never even considered the idea. “It would certainly end all the confusion,” said one of them, chortling.)

But there were many happier and less controversial links between Vienna and Istanbul, Dr. Lucius added. The first medical school in Constantinople had been opened by an Austrian. A Viennese doctor—a man named Hammerschmidt, who had his name changed to Abdullah Bey—had inaugurated the Turkish Red Crescent. The greatest of all the many histories of the Ottomans is that known familiarly as
The Hammer
—written by the Austrian imperial embassy’s late-eighteenth-century drago
man Josef von Hammer-Purgstall, who dressed in Ottoman style and toured for years through every corner of the Empire. In more modern times Austrian foresters helped set up the Turkish reforestation schemes; Austrian pharmacists helped establish the chemical industry; Austrian generals trained the modern Turkish army; Austrian architects designed the Turkish parliament in Ankara, as well as several of the capital’s ministries and the current President’s house; and the first monument erected in the memory of the maker of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, was sculpted in 1926, by an Austrian.

“Is that enough, perhaps?” asked Dr. Lucius, “to show how much better matters are today, than when Kara Mustafa was just outside the Ringstrasse?”

And what other Balkan harmonies might there be, I wondered, here beside the Golden Horn? I knew from Anja, the young woman with whom we had spent time back in Sarajevo, that there was a sizable Serbian community in Istanbul. Most of them were Muslims from the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, that fingerlike extension of Ottoman rule that intruded between southwestern Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro. They huddle close together in the old part of the city, off the Divan Yolu, close to the sprawling covered market. There are Sanjak communities in Izmir and Erzerum, all tucked away in the inner cities, all doing deals, involved at the shadier end of the economic spectrum. In Istanbul they have gathered in the shadow of a small hotel, the Balkan, which is always full of newcomers, usually migrants who have wearied of the fighting or the troubles they all foresee.

It was easy to find Anja’s old boyfriend, Daut. Everyone from the Sanjak in Istanbul seems to know everyone else. There is a hugger-mugger camaraderie among the traders and businessmen and otherwise amiable rogues who lurk in the tiny stalls and basement rooms clustered around the hotel. Daut was at the family jewelry shop; he had a dozen thin gold chains sus
pended from the fingers of one hand and a bottle of beer in the other hand, and he was idly watching a soccer match on television. He jumped with delight at his girlfriend’s name, and within minutes became positively sentimental about Sarajevo. He had been there for much of the war, dealing, making money, involved in goodness knows what.

And when we told him we had been in Kosovo, he called all his friends from the street, and we soon had an excited audience, eager for news of the bombing and of the situation that day. They knew that NATO had bombed towns in Novi Pazar; I told them that I only wished we had been able to get there—but technically the Sanjak was Serbia still, and the Yugoslav authorities had cracked down hard and wouldn’t let anyone in.

“This is why we’re here,” said Daut, and his friends nodded approvingly. “There’s no freedom in the Sanjak—the VJ and the MUP are giving us trouble all the time. The difference is—we’re better dealers, better traders than the Kosovo Albanians, or the Bosniaks. The Serbs need us—we make their system work.”

Daut did not suppose there would be trouble in the Sanjak—he did not expect the Belgrade government to order a program of repression of the Muslims there, as they had, to their cost, in Kosovo. “The next trouble won’t be in the Sanjak—it will be in Montenegro, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. “And as we and Montenegro have a common border—I guess we could feel the effects. But Milosevic, or whoever succeeds him there, is going to crack a few heads in Montenegro. You mark my words. There’ll be a lot more of us here in Turkey before this business is done with.”

They liked the Turks, and the cosmopolitan character of a city which has been a crossroads for all of its existence. Daut spoke a formidable array of languages—Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Polish, Italian, English—and of course Serbian. He could get along perfectly well and might stay for years.

“But of course what we all really want to do is to go home. We have so much in common with the Serbs, apart from our religion
of course—we get on with them. And the Serbs need us—we are their Jews, their Chinese. We’re nothing for the Serbs to feel afraid of. We’ll make money, they’ll make money, everyone will get along.

“But for now—it is too dangerous. And besides, business is too slow. We can make more money down here. It’s just that I—we, all of us—miss the old place. I telephone, when the circuits are working, and I hear their voices, and I feel so sad. The people of the Sanjak are the best there are. We sing, we dance, we drink. We are the very heart of the Balkan people. So what are we doing in Turkey?”

A small indication of Daut’s attitude—and the attitude of the Sanjak people more generally—came later in the evening. We had gone to a bar, to hear a
gusla
player singing sentimental songs that made the Sanjak boys look soulful, homesick. The television was burbling away in the corner, when pictures came on the screen of Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader who was on trial on a tiny prison-island in the Sea of Marmara. Daut called for quiet and had the volume turned up. Ocalan had been found guilty, the announcer said. He would be sentenced in two weeks’ time.

Daut cheered loudly. “That bastard, Ocalan. Of course he’s guilty. Compared with him, Milosevic is an angel. An angel. I tell you, Ocalan has killed fifty thousand people, at the very least. He’s guilty all right—and he should hang for it. And people should know that, compared with him, Milosevic is really not all that bad. There are worse men in the world. And far worse people than the Serbs.”

I had one final mission in Istanbul, a task that also involved looking back along this journey, toward the Balkans. Specifically I had one question left—about the fate of poor old Montenegro, where there had been the argument—one that will be bound to assume greater importance if, as the Sanjak boys were warning, there is trouble brewing—between the two old Orthodox patriarchs. Which of the pair, I had been wondering ever since, was in the right?

Which of the churches of Montenegro deserved the loyalty of the people? Was it the Serbian Orthodox Church, which from its ancient monastery and been offering spiritual leadership for centuries, and most decidedly since the end of the Montenegrin royal family after the end of the Great War? Or should the people now rightly turn, as good and patriotic Montenegrins, to this new Montenegrin Church, which was being run by the Metropolitan Mihailo from its small suburban house on the outskirts of that tiny capital in the mountains, Cetinje? It would be in Istanbul, I suspected, that I would be able to find the answer.

Because Istanbul was far more than what it appeared to be today—this bustling, polyglot, polytheistic crossroads city that stands on the cusps of both Europe and Asia and is eagerly planning a future for itself as a world capital enjoying the benefits of both the continents on which it lies. And it was much more than its predecessor Constantinople had been, too—far more than the exotic headquarters for the mighty but always dreamily expiring empire of the Ottomans. It had long also been Byzantium—ever since the schism that had split the Roman church in two it had been the spiritual center of the Orthodox Church.

For a thousand years, from the three hundreds until the Ottomans stormed the Hagia Sofia church in 1453, Byzantium had been the anchor to a Christian empire that stretched from Ravenna in the west to Mesopotamia in the east, from the Sava River in the north to Tripolitania in North Africa. The emperors ruled in Greek, as Christians; they employed Roman law and the basked in and spread the best of Hellenistic culture. The nearly ninety Byzantine emperors, from Zeno to Constantine XI, at their best ran a tolerant, prosperous, and enlightened empire. The most powerful architect of its fortunes, the great Emperor Justinian, who ruled for thirty-eight years in the sixth century, was born near what is now the great railway-junction city of Nis, in Yugoslavia. When NATO planes were bombing Nis, their pilots likely thought they
were exerting enormous power over the land. Probably most were unaware that one of the very greatest forces ever to have shaped Balkan history came from directly below, deep within their target zone.

The rules of the Orthodox Church, worldwide, give all of the member churches—the Russians, the Greeks, the Serbs, the Cypriots—total autonomy and authority. Except in one small sense, a somewhat indistinct sense of external authority that hovers somewhere between sentiment and tradition, and that is vested in a figure known as the ecumenical patriarch, and who always lives in Istanbul. (Or Constantinople, as his business card defiantly proclaims.)

The patriarch—officially addressed as “Your Beatitude”—is always drawn from Istanbul’s dwindling Greek community and is regarded officially by the government as simply the Greek patriarch. To the church worldwide, however, he is its still center—a symbol, not of authority, but of, let us say, Orthodox good manners. He will raise an eyebrow or look askance—and a whole canon of behavior in a distant patriarchate will subtly change. He is not there to order or to be obeyed: He is there to counsel, and to warn.

The current ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew, was appointed in 1991, and like his predecessors for two thousand years, lives in the district of old Istanbul called the Fener, from the word
Phanar,
the Greek word for the lighthouse that once stood there to warn of a shoal in the Golden Horn. His achdeacon, a supreme authority on ecclesiastical questions, is an American named Peter Anton from San Antonio, Texas, and whose formal priestly name is Archdeacon Tarasios. He is a learned, fussy, bustling man, who when he had our audience was constantly on the telephone, handing out books and press releases and his E-mail address, all the time shooing in and out of his study supplicants and mendicants and aspirant priests, and those new members of the church who wished to be blessed by a brief audience with the patriarch himself.