What the Traveller Saw (8 page)

B
ACK IN
1965, for those who wanted to pass a week or two in wild country among pastoral people there was scarcely anywhere in Europe to compare with the Picos de Europa in the north of Spain, the mountainous area on the borders of Santander, Asturias and Leon (the actual place where these provinces meet is on the 7710-foot Pico Tesorero right in the middle of the massif).

The peaks rose in pale clusters like giant fungi. They are not particularly high but they are sheer, and standing in the heart of them it was difficult to believe that you were only about fifteen miles from the sea. In clear weather they shimmered remotely in a haze of heat; in bad weather, when the clouds pressed down on their tops, they seemed to take a step forward and close in on the narrow valleys. This was when they were at their most awe-inspiring, when the clouds swirled down through the gullies, and from high above came the sound of falling rocks and stones.

Up here in the Picos, even if one had no intention of climbing them but only of scrambling about between them, it was wise to be properly equipped. There were a number of mountain refuges for climbers and skiers. The wild life was extensive, much of the area was a National Park. There were chamois, known locally as the
rebeco
, which had been saved from extinction by the intervention of King Alfonso XIII at a time when they were rapidly being exterminated in great
battues.

There were wolves, wild cats, eagle owls, eagles and ospreys; and it was also one of the refuges of the European
Brown Bear, the flesh of which the inhabitants used to smoke-cure like ham. It is therefore not surprising that in 1989 little more than half a dozen remain. The Picos were as remote in their way as the mountains of the Hindu Kush on the borders of Nuristan, and they bore a remarkable resemblance to them.

The inhabitants existed in an isolation that was truly remarkable. Many of the villages were snowed up for half the year. One of the most lonely was in a cleft at the foot of an enormous cliff and in winter it must have lain in almost perpetual shadow. The only way to it was by a narrow path which corkscrewed up to it through a gorge, and it was a wonder that anyone in the second half of the twentieth century still had the resolution to live there.

The people of the Picos were short, dark, and round-headed. In summer they made a powerful and excellent cheese from goat’s milk, curdled by having a calf’s gall put into it, called Picon, which at its best resembled a decaying Roquefort. The bad feeling that had always existed between the people of the remote village of Sotres and the equally remote village of Tresviso was all about whose cheese was the best. Both sorts smelt terrible and it needed strength of mind to bring one home to England.

They also made butter which they stored, together with the cheese, in stone bothies. When they had made enough to warrant a journey to one of the surrounding valleys, the black-robed women (some of the older ones wore green petticoats trimmed with orange or scarlet) loaded the butter and cheese on to ponies and travelled fifteen miles down the mountainside at a murderous lope to a village, where they either sold or bartered it. They accomplished the thirty-mile journey, which included a four-thousand-foot descent and ascent, in one day.

When travelling without animals they carried packs made from a whole goatskin; wearing them with the forelegs over
their shoulders and the hind legs around the waist, they appeared to have animals crouching on their backs, like figures in a painting by Hieronymous Bosch. It was a strange sight.

This region was already in danger, in 1965, of suffering the same fate as the Italian Dolomites. Roads were planned up the deep valleys of the Duje river to Sotres, and up the Cares, which had splendid salmon fishing at that time, to the village of Cain. A
teleférico
was already under construction which would take tourists 2000 metres up into the Picos from Fuento-Dé, where the river Deva rose. Perhaps the people of Tresviso, Sotres and Cain would be glad. For them this was no mountain arcady. They would probably soon be happily selling souvenirs, but a way of life would be gone for ever. Now, in 1989, what was feared for the Picos and its inhabitants has come true.

T
HE FIRST TIME
I saw Istanbul was in 1956 when I finally arrived there in a Land Rover, seven days out from Barnes, SW13, after a shattering journey through the Balkans. As we drove along the last long stretch of road, lurching in the potholes, the Sea of Marmara appeared before us, green and windswept, deserted except for a solitary caique beating up towards the Bosphorus under a big press of sail. Our spirits rose at the thought of seeing Istanbul when the sun was setting, but when we reached the outskirts it was already dark. We had planned to enter the city by the Golden Gate on the seaward side, for it sounded romantic, not knowing that it had been sealed up for several hundred years. Instead we found ourselves on an interminable bypass lined with luminous advertisements for banks and razor blades. There was no sign of the land walls constructed by Theodosius in the first half of the fifth century, but they were still there.

Our next sight of Istanbul was almost exactly ten years later, in the spring of 1966. Again, we took seven days to drive from England, but they were less uncomfortable ones. This time we contrived to arrive in broad daylight.

There is no lovelier scene on earth than that which opens up before the traveller as he approaches Constantinople from the Sea of Marmara … On the left, washed by the waves, the quaint old battlements extend from Seraglio Point to the Seven Towers, a distance of nearly four miles; and over them rise in picturesque confusion the terrace roofs, domes and minarets of Stamboul.

So wrote the anonymous author of the excellent
Handbook for Travellers
published by John Murray in 1878, which we happened to have with us.

The waters of Marmara no longer washed the battered walls of Byzantium. Below what remained of them, here on the seaward side, a wide corniche road ran along a barren and artificial foreshore, made up of rubble, to Seraglio Point, at the mouth of the Golden Horn, the inlet which divides the old city of Stamboul from the more modern, European quarter of Pera, or Beyoglu to the north.

Here the road rounded Seraglio Point, off which unwanted odalisques were drowned in weighted sacks by the Palace gardeners (some sultans purged their harems of old stock in this manner with the regularity of careful motorists making an oil change). The greatest slaughter took place in the reign of the mad Sultan Ibrahim, who reigned from 1640 to 1649. He had 280 of his odalisques, the whole lot, drowned off Seraglio Point.

At the frontier near Edirne, in Thrace, we had provided ourselves with a copy of the Turkish Traffic Regulations in English, if only to see how many years it was possible to spend in prison by infringing them (a fate to be avoided at all costs). There were ‘special speed limit for turcks and motorbikes’, and ‘unless diected by a sing or decree, it is forbidden to use the sounding devices unnecessarily or in a manner that would disturb public peace’.

No one, except ourselves, took the slightest notice of this edict, and if one was staying at an hotel it was necessary to insist on a room at least five floors up, and preferably facing away from the main road.

There were a million taxis, and what were known as ‘
dolmus
’ – which means ‘stuffed’ taxis. They followed fixed routes and were shared by a number of passengers, making them much cheaper than real taxis. However, if you were an obvious tourist, an empty
dolmus
would instantly become a
real taxi. But neither real nor stuffed taxis were, in fact, expensive.

In those days the driving was wild. Huge, beat-up American automobiles, which looked as if they had been hatched in the Prehistoric Department of the Natural History Museum, collided with one another, sometimes in threes and fours, and exploded in clouds of dust. When these had finally settled and expired, passengers emerged, apparently suffering from nothing worse than severe shock, and tottered away in search of yet another
dolmus
, as if realizing the futility of pursuing the matter at an official level.

Then there was a moment of glory when we crossed the Golden Horn by the floating Galata Bridge. On the far side of it was Galata, and above it on the hill, Pera. Ferry boats chugging to and from the Asian shore, belching black smoke, were packed together close up to the bridge at either end of it, which was heaving and groaning in the swell.

Out in the Bosphorus there were a couple of huge tankers on their way up in ballast to Batum, ships were at anchor in the entrance to the Golden Horn, scores of slender rowing boats danced on the water; and the air was filled with the whistling of ferry boats, the mooing of big ships’ sirens, and the recorded cries of the muezzins from the minarets of a dozen or so mosques. It was also full of the kippery smell of fish being cooked, for the benefit of the passing trade, in open boats down by the approaches to the bridge, and – because the wind was blowing down the Golden Horn, from what was once the Sweet Waters of Europe, green arcadian meadows, the resort of ladies of the Imperial harem – the stench of tanneries was also in the air.

Looking back, a hazardous procedure when driving a Land Rover over the Galata Bridge, there was the incomparable skyline of Old Stamboul. To see Istanbul as it really should be seen, you had to climb a minaret. There were 240 steps choked with pigeon shit to the upper gallery of a minaret at
the Sulemaniye mosque, and permission to make the climb was necessary from the head of the Muslim hierarchy, but it was worth it. Ahead was Pera with almost vertical cobbled streets leading up to the heights above. Pera exuded a melancholy rare even in the West; but now the preternaturally tall, nineteenth-century buildings, which made it so gloomy, are being torn down, and that is truly a loss to be bewailed.

On these slopes stood the Pera Palas Hotel. With the burning of Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Pera Palas had become one of the few grand hotels to survive in the Near East. It had brass bedsteads and a suite once occupied by Atatürk, which looked as if it was being kept on regulo 1 for his return to earthly pleasures. Atatürk actually died in the Dolmabahçe Palace on 10 November 1938 at five past one, at which hour the innumerable clocks in the building were all stopped for ever.

High above it, hidden in the woods, was Yildiz, the palace built by Sultan Abd ul-Hamid II, one of the loneliest men in Europe. Here he constructed a labyrinth of tunnels in which he could take refuge from assassins, and keep up his pistol practice, taking coffee with himself in a number of kiosks which he erected for this purpose.

On the far, Asian shore were the Sweet Waters of Asia, more waterside meadows where the Sultan and his court spent their summer leisure days. Less despoiled than the Sweet Waters of Europe, it was now a fairground. All along this Asian shore the beautiful wooden
yalis
, the houses that in some cases overhung the water, were now so ruinous that they were actually falling into it. Out in the stream, the water, which was still reasonably unpolluted, was green and very cold and seethed like water in a boiling pot. Jellyfish abounded.

The enormous Selimiye Barracks were also on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, facing the entrance to the Golden Horn in Üsküdar. It was here that Florence Nightingale
tended the Crimean wounded – the cemetery in which those who died were buried was close by. Üsküdar was a place of mosques and cemeteries. Nearby was the largest Muslim cemetery in Asia. Hordes of the faithful were laid to rest among the cypress trees, together with the saintly Karaca Ahmet and his favourite horse.

The Kapali Çarşisi, the Great Bazaar, was a city hidden within a city. It had 18 doors all locked at night and guarded by savage dogs, 66 named streets, five mosques, countless cupolas, and covered an area of 47 acres – 51.7 if one included a number of the neighbouring
hans
(caravanserais). Yet it was still possible to find oases of calm in its long passages, such as those in the northern part rarely visited by tourists because the shops only sold skins, plastic foam and other items which not even the most demented tourist would have wanted to cart away.

The
hans
were built round open courts in which the animals of the caravans were once tethered. Leading off the vaulted corridors on the upper storeys were the rooms which provided accommodation for the merchants and their drivers. Some were now occupied by metal workers, but they still had an exciting aspect, especially at night when they were illuminated by fires and furnaces. These and the underground cisterns of the city of which more than eighty had been discovered were among the most extraordinary remains in Istanbul.

In the cistern known as Yerebatan Saray, ‘The Buried Palace’, twelve rows of 28 reddish brown columns – with mottled green stains on some of them – topped by Byzantine Corinthian capitals, rose from the water like the boles of enormous trees in a flooded forest. The columns, carved with the marks of the men who erected them in the sixth century, in the time of Justinian, soared up into the murk towards the invisible roof. Half of their height was embedded in the silt beneath our feet. Another was the Binbirdirek, ‘The Thousand and One
Columns’, a slight oriental hyperbole, since there were only 224 originally, but it was no less impressive for that. Built possibly by a Roman senator in the sixth century in the time of Constantine the Great, it was entered through a decrepit building in a quiet square, in which the custodian switched on the illuminations by hooking a couple of bare wires to the main, and you descended a flight of steps through what resembled, in winter, a thick fog. In this cistern the only water was that which dripped from the roof.

Above ground, close by, behind Haghia Sophia, and inside the Imperial gate of the Seraglio (Top Kapi), was the basilica of Haghia Eirene (the Divine Peace); a vast, empty building with ochre walls, a dark cross in mosaic on the vault of the apse, and below it the patriarch’s throne with six tiers of seats in a semicircle for the clergy. Outside this church, in the year 346, three thousand people were killed in a confrontation between two bands of Christians: the Arians and the orthodox upholders of the Nicene Creed.

This church was one of the most memorable Christian buildings in Istanbul. The Kariye Camii, otherwise St Saviour in Chora, out by the northwestern walls through which the Turks broke into the city in 1453, was another. This little sixth-century church, which later became a mosque, had singularly beautiful mosaics and wall paintings which were brought to light and restored in 1958.

And there was the palace of Topkapi. At that time the Harem had not yet been opened to the public, but by pulling a number of strings we were admitted to a part of it – a bitterly cold 400-room labyrinth on several floors, room after echoing room, abandoned and scarcely ever opened since Abd ul-Medjid I, the last Sultan to maintain a harem there, left it in 1853 to live in the Dolmabahçe Palace. Most macabre were the quarters occupied by the Black Eunuchs on duty, the Karagalar Tasligi, three storeys high, more like a deep ditch than a human habitation, its only ornament a great gaping
fireplace on the ground floor, now full of fallen rubble. In the reign of Murad III (1574–95) there were between six and eight hundred Black Eunuchs who had entry to the Harem, most of whom must have lived outside. Murad III had 1200 harem women, by whom he had 103 children. Twenty sons and twenty-seven daughters survived him. His eldest son, who succeeded him as Mehmet III, had all his nineteen brothers put to death and seven of his father’s pregnant concubines drowned.

The only sounds in this strange place were those made by the hordes of bats, mice behind the wainscotings, and the whistling of the ferry boats in the Bosphorus.