Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope
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have also disappeared. Geographical features have proved even less permanent. In the background of one shot of the aqueduct there is a glint of water from the shallow Amouk Lake; it no longer exists, drained and brought under the plough. The castle is even in a different country now; in 1935 Syria’s northern border reached the Mediterranean at Payas, bringing both Alexandretta and Antioch, now Iskenderun and Antakya, within the French mandate. At the outbreak of the Second World War this region, known as the Hatay, was ceded to Turkey partly in the hope of securing her neutrality.
Both Baghras and Darbsak had surrendered quickly to Salah al-Din; Antioch was left without a single defence and seemingly at his mercy, but the expected siege never even began. With his skirmishers raiding up to the very walls of the city, dissension spread amongst his men and their commanders. They had been campaigning from May to late September. Ramadan was coming and they wanted to go home. They had land to plough. A truce was concluded that was to run until the end of the following April when, if no help had arrived, Antioch was to be surrendered to the Sultan. May 1189 came, but no Muslim army with it, rather news that Frederick Barbarossa, the 70-year-old Holy Roman Emperor, had just set out from Regensburg with a largely German army, more numerous than any Crusading force before it. As Salah al-Din foresaw, they took the land route, slowly, to Constantinople and Konya, where they defeated a Seljuk army the following May. The road to Antioch through the Christian Kingdom of Cilician Armenia was open to the Crusaders, but in June the German Emperor drowned while crossing a river and his army lost heart. Some stragglers reached Tyre by sea from Tarsus, but most went home. The real threat from Europe, the sea-borne armies of Philip II of France and Richard Coeur de Lion of England, did not arrive until the following spring. Antioch remained in Christian hands for another eighty years.
Ahmad Bey scanned Hackett’s photographs of Antioch street scenes with the magnifying glass he normally used to read the newspaper, looking for people he knew; he was old enough to have appeared in them himself. Passing by the camera along the market street are Arab boys in galabiyas riding donkeys, men wearing Western jackets over the long robe, a youth from the hills in riding pantaloons, soft-soled buskins and collarless coat with embroidered sleeves. Three men in Western suits stand talking by a telegraph pole, the one in the homburg set at a jaunty angle looks straight into the lens. Only the Turkish greengrocer is bare-headed, wearing a waistcoat over his white shirt, standing with his arms crossed in front of his displays of fruit and vegetables; everyone else is wearing a skull-cap or a tarbush or a peaked cap. There is only one woman to be seen, swathed in a white veil. Taken together the pictures look like the raw material for an illustration from a Tintin adventure. Ahmad Bey maintained the sartorial conventions of yesteryear as well as his gentlemanly Ottoman title, wearing a jacket and tie even in retirement, smoking cigarettes through a yellowed bone holder. He called for a round of tea.
Most days Ahmad Bey is to be found here, once a barber’s shop, now a sort of social club for his passing friends. It stands in the acute angle between two converging roads, a rhomboid room commanding the confluence, glazed on three sides, both observation platform and hall of public audience. Ahmad’s family were Turks who had been granted land in the Hatay at the time of the Ottoman conquest in 1516 and he still had large holdings. His tenants could bring their problems to him here. Turkish rule, administered by an army of bureaucrats, the janissaries, made up of Christian converts from the empire’s European lands, replaced that of the Mamelukes of Egypt, soldier-slaves from the Caucasus, but for the local peasantry the certainties of the seasons, taxes and death abided.
Ahmad Bey’s tenantry was largely Arab. ‘But if you ask them if they want to be part of Syria again, they will say no, like me. They can see it is better in Turkey. They can see there is no freedom there. In Turkey there is democracy, in Syria a dictator. Yes, the economy could be better, but Syria’s is worse. Here there is modern education and a free press. Even the Christians,’ he gestured down the road towards the Orthodox church, ‘even they want to be in Turkey. The people who say the Hatay should go back to Syria are all in Syria. What about joining Europe? The people who say yes are also wrong. Look,’ he pointed to a calendar on the wall distributed by a political party, ‘that is what we Turks should join, the countries of the other Turks.’ On a map of the Middle East and Central Asia the countries of the Turks and the regions of other countries where Turks were in the majority formed a single green block, with Northern Cyprus stuck out in the Mediterranean: the lands of the Azeris, the Kazaks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Uighurs as well as Turkey.
The idea of a pan-Turkic federation is not a new one. It first found political expression in the 1880s among the Turks of the Crimea and lower Volga and its doctrine of the ‘unity of language, thought and action’ of all Turkic peoples was taken up in Istanbul as the Empire’s fortunes waned. The formation of nation-states in Europe along the lines of ethnicity and language – Italy and Germany – at the expense of declining empires, provided a paradigm not only for the Ottomans’ Slavic and Arab subject nations, but also for the Turks themselves. The collapse of the Soviet empire revived the dream, but the opportunity was largely spurned. ‘Too busy looking west to turn east,’ said Ahmad Bey. Below the map were printed a pair of quotations from the twin heroes of nationalism, Ataturk and Alp Arslan, who defeated the Byzantines at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, opening Asia Minor to Turkish conquest. ‘Ah, and here is someone who can translate them better than I,’ he claimed. At the door were two modestly dressed Western women, one older, slight, the other in her early twenties and robust in a corn-fed North American way. The younger one clutched a book to her chest that looked like a vinyl-covered day-to-a-page diary and turned out to be a New Testament, ragged with bookmarks. Their arrival demanded another round of tea.
Christine, the older woman, had been working as a missionary in Turkey for the last decade, and Sandi had been sent to join her for a few months by their church in Canada. As Christine and Ahmad Bey talked in Turkish, Sandi seemed to drift off into a world of her own, smiling inwardly and making repeated searches in her text. She found something that made her raise a fist and let out a mini-whoop of the kind usually heard at sporting events. Christine and Ahmad stopped to look at her. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I just found the great text I thought of when Yusuf was explaining the Holy Trinity to his wife on the back of that envelope.’ They had just come from a home visit with one of Christine’s few converts. She smiled indulgently at Sandi’s outburst.
‘Here are two texts,’ said Ahmad pointing to the calendar, ‘for you, Christine, to translate.’
‘Well, everyone knows that saying of Mustafa Kamal – “happy he who can call himself a Turk” – you see it spelled out in whitewashed stones on the hillsides behind barracks. This second one, “Size öyle bir vatan aldim ki ebediyen sizin olacaktir”, is something about how good the country is and how Alp Arslan is giving it to the Turks forever – like a Promised Land, eh, Ahmad Bey?’
‘No such thing. If you have the land, it’s yours; if you don’t have it no one can promise it to you.’ Christine had an amused expression when she spoke, more playful than beatific, and it seemed she and Ahmad frequently enjoyed such discussions. ‘Oh, we talk about history and religion and the history of religion,’ said Ahmad. ‘In the Middle East they are the same thing. What else is there to talk about and where better to do it? You know that both St Peter and St Paul preached in Antioch and it was here that the followers of Jesus the Nazarene were first called Christians.’
‘And St Simeon, the guy on the pillar,’ Sandi chimed in. ‘That’s why I wanted to come here. The pastor at the church organised a fund-raiser last summer where we recreated living on a pillar. It was a lot of fun. We built a pillar about twenty feet high and we took it in turns. We stayed up there for thirty days.’ Christine had taken her to the ruins of the monastery that grew up around the hermit’s pillar, high on a hill above the Orontes River. The stump of the pillar still stands; Sandi had had her picture taken sitting on the top. ‘And he was up there thirty years. Praises.’
The end of the nineteenth century saw the colonial powers involved in an unseemly scramble for territory in Africa. Europe’s two newest countries, Italy and Germany, saw their chance