The Sultan of Byzantium (18 page)

Mistral planned to stay in Istanbul until December 29, without an intense working plan. I took her the next day to visit Galata and we had lunch at the Tower. Discovering that she was a good listener, I showed her the sights of the district point by point from the Tower’s panoramic perspective, as if I wanted her to get to like the place. I was certain that the small-time shopkeepers were whispering that I’d found another expensive prostitute, and the neighborhood women were gossiping about how the cat at last had caught the mouse.

On our way back from the Samatya neighborhood, whose name was unchanged since the foundation of Byzantium, she said she wanted to meet my family. She managed to impress everybody – kissed my grandmother’s hand, made my mother laugh with something she whispered in her ear, and teased Hayal in German. I knew what I would be put through after this short visit. Straightaway, my grandmother issued her orders: ‘This girl is an angel, my son. Marry her as soon as she converts to Islam and changes her name to Ayşe,’ and Hayal teased me, saying, ‘The woman of your life came to your feet.’ I squelched her, however, with my reply, ‘She has a boyfriend, I believe.’

Mistral and I met every day. I took her to the Princes Islands and Yoros Castle, to second-hand sellers of history books. I was never bored when I was with her. I moved past her physical beauty and was overwhelmed by her inner world. I assumed that she knew how I felt. I narrated scenes from my travels to her, and in return was treated to obscure Palaeologan anecdotes. We conducted ‘irony competitions’, watched movies and documentaries at my apartment, cooked and washed dishes together. We were as relaxed as two people with no expectations of each other could be.

On the morning of the 29
^th
of December I took her to the airport. The day before that we’d wandered around the Covered Bazaar at Selçuk Altun’s suggestion and stopped in at a place called The Blue Corner. In this mysterious little shop I caught her looking at an antique gold Ottoman necklace called an ‘Armudiye’, for the pear-shaped gemstone on it. I bought it secretly, and gave it to her as she was about to board the Stockholm plane. Her eyes opened wide and she said, ‘What are you, some kind of aristocratic character escaped from a romantic novel?’

Although there were lots of weighty books on Iznik ceramics – an overrated topic in my opinion – there was no comprehensive history of Iznik itself. Established as the capital city of Bithynia in the fourth century
B.C
., it served later as capital of the Byzantine Empire in exile, not to mention its role in the Seljuk and Ottoman empires. The city was enriched by monuments memorializing five civilizations and was shaped like a helmet turned toward the East as if its feelings were hurt by the West.

The basic tenets of Christianity were first laid down in Iznik – which was then Nicaea – when the Roman Emperor Constantine I called the First Ecumenical Council in the year 325. My sources did not go into detail about the precise venue of the Council, the more sensitive ones merely speculating ‘perhaps the emperor’s palace was used for the meeting.’ Although various authors referred to Samuel settling in Iznik because of its nice weather when he stepped out of his father Noah’s Ark for a break, nobody even hazarded a guess about where the emperor’s palace might have been. Those experts I asked for help found my questions out of place. The most tangible assistance came from a second-hand bookseller named Püzant (in Armenian it means ‘Byzantium’). I met him through Selçuk Altun. After speaking with some officials at the Patriarchate, he informed me that the palace had stood on the south shore of the lake and was probably now beneath the waves.

I once visited Iznik with Eugenio when I was at high school. It was a one-day excursion on a calm Sunday in November. For the three miles of ancient walls Eugenio used an archaic Turkish word,
mukavim
. I was then too shy to ask what it meant, which was something like ‘robust’. Eugenio not only spoke Turkish better than anyone else, he used to show off by embellishing it with old but meaningful words. I liked the walls because they turned the city into a toy town. The intense greenery, however, was about to take over the historic texture like an undefined brush stroke. I liked the persimmons, too, that hung like lanterns on the short trees surrounding the houses.

When I combined what I read in the books with my impressions from that early trip, I conceived the idea that any clue I might find at the Haghia Sophia church or the Nilufer Hatun
imaret
– mainly a soup kitchen for the poor – would lead me to the palace. We climbed into a minibus as a team. To Askaris, who was hunched over beside me, I said, ‘For this fourth clue I’m supposed to find a place that’s not even mentioned in the history books. I hope Nomo hasn’t screwed up.’ All he did was to bow his head.

We pulled into Iznik on a misty January morning. (What I first liked about the city was its population of only 22,000 souls.) Although it was a weekday, there wasn’t much action on the streets. The town looked like a quiet park, with the inhabitants trying to conform to the image. I got out of the vehicle now and then to make little discovery tours, but it wasn’t clear whether I benefited from them: was my motivation the pleasures of tourism or a semi-conscious expectation?

The buildings still standing inside the walls were in dimensional collaboration. None of them threatened the town’s panorama. Among all the churches, fountains, theaters, cemeteries, mosques, tombs, hamams and medreses, I was most impressed by the minarets. Since they were not in competition to see which could be tallest, they avoided scraping the sky and were holier for the fact. I learned that originally the town and the lake did not bear the same name. Lake Askania resembled a blue-gray blanket on a deserted piece of land. The cool serenity proceeding from the thick green canopy of the town reminded me of Sparta. I thought that owing to all the historical turbulence it had to endure Iznik had been endowed with a long term of living in a cocoon. I hesitated a while and then decided that the aroma dominating the atmosphere was that of burned fig. The silent men who filled the low-ceilinged coffeehouses looked like they were expecting news. If someone told me that they were agricultural extras in a 1980s soap opera, I would have believed it. They appeared totally unaware that they were citizens of one of the twenty most ancient towns on earth. But if they couldn’t name the three historic churches within walking distance, they at least maintained an upright posture. This refinement, stemming from simplicity, was also a characteristic of the inmates of the local monasteries before corruption set in.

Nilüfer Hatun, a noble lady of Greek origin, was the mother of Sultan Murat I. The
imaret
he built in her name had since 1960 hosted the Iznik Museum. The way they displayed artifacts of civilization from prehistoric to Ottoman times was so perfunctory that it killed the appetite to see any more of the museum. The Islamic tombstones and Roman sarcophagi in the garden impressed me, however. I watched a small mob of children playing hide-and-seek among them and thought that if I could record this on video, I could show it in every biennale around the world. As I expected, there were no clues awaiting me here. Feeling like the first man in history to leave this charitable institution empty-handed, I rejoined the team and we continued on to the church of Haghia Sophia.

When an earthquake demolished this ancient church in the sixth century, the Emperor Justinian built a new one in the same place. All the Byzantine emperors-in-exile were crowned here, in this place that looked to me like a giant prayer room. Some time after the Ottomans conquered Iznik they converted the church to a mosque; the conversion was carried out by the master architect, Mimar Sinan, on orders of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. The building was now a skeleton, playing the role of a boutique museum. My point of reference in this isolated place was the mosaic floor. The two-thousand-square-foot stone creation bore an interesting pattern of geometric figures in pastels, dominated by the color purple. As I pored over the kaleidoscopic work stone by stone I recalled the reference books I’d read. Nearly all of them just recycled quotations; none presented any original findings. I needed new sources, not those old constipated histories. (Hadn’t I learned a lot about the Ottoman world from reading Karacaoğlan’s poetry?) The guard in the booth unwillingly gave me the phone number of a guide named Sedat Engür. But Engür came readily when he heard that I was going to pay him a hundred TL an hour for his services. We met on the minibus. He was a retired history teacher but looked like a character out of
commedia dell’ arte
. I asked a few questions to test his knowledge as well as to help exhaust his desire to talk.

If one ignored his mispronunciation of proper names, what he told me was more or less analogous to what I’d read. He narrated history with the sincerity of a storyteller, and in a musical tone besides. He squinted his eyes and his paragraphs grew longer and he rocked his upper body to and fro like a Koran reader. When I asked where the First Ecumenical Council was held, he was startled. I almost heard him say, ‘Are you the police?’ It was clear that he did not accept failure in the event of being asked a question to which he had no answer. ‘People talk about a “council palace” or “council church” but nobody knows the address of such a place,’ he said curtly, and mentioned disparagingly a local character named Üstat Reha.

The person he referred to belonged to an old Iznik family that had eventually moved to Istanbul. Reha read history in England and became an academic overseas. When he retired, he came back to Istanbul. But he always spent spring and summer in Iznik. He was a confirmed bachelor. Because of his claim that when it came to Iznik’s history he was the most knowledgeable of all, the townspeople nicknamed him ‘üstat’, or ‘master.’ He swore that he would one day write the definitive history of the place, but since he was an alcoholic nobody took him seriously. As Sedat Engür rambled on about where the First Ecumenical Council might have been held, I cut him short and said, ‘Will you please give me Reha Bey’s address?’ With a hint of gloating in his tone, he replied, ‘He died two months ago.’

I went to the motel where Master Reha camped out when he was in Iznik. Had someone told the receptionist, Recai, ‘Smile constantly!’? If I spent a night at this moldy motel, I could probably squeeze some information about Üstat Reha out of Recai, who had the looks of an accomplice. Motel Askania was an ugly three-storey building on the southeastern coast of the lake. It appeared to have been erected to sabotage the charming harmony between lake and nature – which was also true of all the other buildings thrown up in haste over the past fifty years. The old fellows in the lobby playing with prostitutes young enough to be their granddaughters must have arrived in the jeep with Bursa license plates parked in front. Askaris and I rented two rooms; in keeping with Nomo regulations, the bodyguards and driver would stay at a neighboring hotel. We’d come to Iznik prepared for eventualities, with a suitcase each. Askaris said he was tired and took to his room, so I approached Recai.

Tucking a fifty-lira note into his jacket pocket, I said, ‘My curiosity is aroused – they said that if you want to get to know Iznik, you can’t do it without Üstat Reha.’ He was probably arranging his sentences in his mind as his left eye took in the cash.

‘Who doesn’t know Üstat Reha?’ he said. ‘This is my thirteenth year at Askania. Reha Bey first stayed in this motel the autumn after I started. He usually remained from May to September. When he was sober he wouldn’t talk, and when he was drunk nobody listened to him. If he was in good health he walked around the lake in the mornings and around town in the early evening. He drank at night and sometimes wouldn’t emerge from his room for two days. He was a gentle man and they say he saw and knew a lot. He was always on medication of some kind – he told the waiters in the lobby that he was paying for the sins of his youth. At the end of last summer, before he went back to Istanbul, he gave a bag to me to keep. Inside it are notes on Iznik. I planned to pass it on to somebody else one day if I found anybody to take it.

‘Hamdi the taxi driver was Reha Bey’s regular chauffeur in his commutes. Hamdi came in November with an aluminum box in his hand; Üstat Reha had died in a European city I never heard of. In his will he asked to be cremated and his ashes cast into the lake. Right after that event a myth went around town. It seems that the ninety-year-old ancients who’d never opened their mouths before now began to claim that Üstat Reha’s forebears were not really Muslims but Christians who converted.’

This exposition was followed by two shallow anecdotes about the Master’s scholarliness and generosity. Likely Recai was after another tip as well as getting rid of his custodianship of the bag.

‘Do you want to see the bag?’ was his question, as I expected it would be.

‘Yes, okay, why not?’ I said, trying not to appear too eager.

Inside the green cloth bag was an Aquascutum briefcase that contained two folders and a thick Venetian notebook with an ornamental cover. On the first page was written REHA EKIN in black ink. Two arrows drawn over it intersected in such a way as to say: Read this in reverse. NIKE AHER. The words moved me. ‘Nikea’ was the Greek form of ‘Iznik’, and ‘Her’ was a shortened version of the town’s first known name, ‘Helikore’. Even if Reha Ekin was not a real person, or if he failed to present a useful clue in the thick journal, I was sure to find an intriguing life story. One of the folders contained maps and pencil drawings of people and historical buildings; the other contained notes in English and the chapter-by-chapter outline of a proposed book. My soul was overwhelmed with a near-orgiastic excitement. I respectfully closed the briefcase and slipped a hundred-lira note into Recai’s pocket that he pretended not to notice.

We went to the nearest fish restaurant as a group. To annoy Askaris I invited our driver to join us. All four ordered catfish. I called them sharks with feet. It was amusing to see the Laz driver gazing at me with piteous eyes as I ate my vegetarian meal of salad, yogurt and toast. When our coffee arrived I said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m going upstairs to review a couple of local sources, but we all know that’s not going to be much help. My feeling is that this may well be our last supper together.’