Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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wheels! – whizz! whizz! all by steam!
TRAVELLER (to the Dragoman).–What does the Pasha mean by that whizzing? he does not mean to say, does he, that our Government will ever abandon their pledges to the Sultan?
DRAGOMAN. –No, your excellency, but he says the English talk by wheels and steam.
TRAVELLER. –That’s an exaggeration; but say that the English really have carried machinery to great perfection. Tell the Pasha (he’ll be struck with that) that whenever we have any disturbances to put down, even at two or three hundred miles from London, we can send troops by the thousand to the scene of the action in a few hours.
DRAGOMAN (recovering his temper and freedom of speech).–His Excellency, this Lord of Mudcombe, observes to your Highness, that whenever the Irish, or the French, or the Indians rebel against the English, whole armies of soldiers and brigades of artillery are dropped into a mighty chasm called Euston Square, and, in the biting of a cartridge, they rise up again in Manchester, or Dublin, or Paris, or Delhi, and utterly exterminate the enemies of England from the face of the earth.
I asked general Oytun through Miss Ozmen whether he faced any problems with drugs. Apparently translating the governor’s Turkish, she stated flatly, “We, as Turks, don’t use them, as a nation.”
“I meant, is there much smuggling of drugs through this area?”
She and the governor talked back and forth for a minute in Turkish. Then she said, “The main source of drugs is Lebanon. He would like to emphasise that. Syria supports it, because Syria makes money from it. The drugs are discovered especially from the sea, because they are passing by the sea on our coasts. In the last two years, four tons of drugs were discovered. A great many smugglers were arrested on their way to Italy and Germany.”
“What were they smuggling?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Were they smuggling hashish or heroin?”
She asked the governor. “Heroin.”
“Four tons of heroin?”
The security officers interrupted her, and a discussion began among the four of them. After a few minutes, she said, “It was the hashish ...”
As I began to write down her answer, she added, “… which is made into heroin.”
“Hashish is made into heroin?”
“Of course.”
“I thought opium was the raw material of heroin.”
She conferred again with the governor and his security chiefs. Finally, she answered, though I was not certain on whose behalf, “A special acid is used to convert the hashish into heroin.”
The governor was smiling. He stood to escort Miss Ozmen and me out of his office through the main door opposite his desk. As we left, I saw him disappear with his security chiefs through a padded door next to the portrait of Atatürk.
DRAGOMAN.– The Pasha wishes your Excellency a pleasant journey.
So ends the visit.
Ayfer Ozmen confessed she was not a professional interpreter, merely one of those called in by the governor’s office for the rare English-speaking visitor. She had been a tourist guide and knew most of the sights in and around Antioch, so she compensated by kindly driving me to see St Peter’s Church on Mount Silpius. We drove through Sanay, the industrial outskirts of Antioch, to the cultivated fields of the river plain and up the slopes of the mountain.
Scores of farmers in small trucks were blocking the road, unloading tobacco to sell at the government tobacco depot. The brown leaves had been cured, pressed and wrapped in burlap, ready at the roadside for government inspectors to value. Some of the farmers sat on top of their bundles, as expectant as actors waiting for applause at the conclusion of a performance. The fresh tobacco filled the air with a delicious, savoury aroma, and it was not unpleasant to enjoy the smell while we waited for the tobacco trucks to clear the road. When we finally passed the tobacco market, “Moonlight” Ozmen drove up the hill and turned into the small drive of St Peter’s Church/Museum.
We walked up a steep flight of steps to a terrace. The gatekeeper waived the entry fee for Miss Ozmen, who was a sort of unofficial guide. I paid, and we stepped into the paved garden in front of St Peter’s. Successive generations of Christians had added carved doors and a grand façade, like that of a Romanesque cathedral, to the little cave where St Peter had waited with his flock outside the pagan city of Antioch. It was a lovely sight, and “Moonlight” and I were alone enjoying it. We went inside to find a huge natural grotto. On the wall, the English version of a framed notice in several languages read:
St. Peter’s Grotto
In the 29 to 40 AD period, after the death of Christ, when his Apostles went all over the world to teach his word, St Peter came to Antakya. The first meeting took place in this cave where you are standing. At that meeting, this group who then had no definite name received the name of “Christian”, meaning belonging to the faith of Christ. Since the first meeting was in this place, it is said to be the first Christian church. In the 12 or 13th century, with certain additions to the front part of the place, the cave was made into a church.
Water dripping from above had long ago destroyed the mosaics and frescoes that once decorated the church. There were ten old benches scattered about the grotto, which was nearly bare of ornament. An altar stood near one wall, something which had surely not been there in St Peter’s time. Nearby, however, was a feature which had. “You see,” Miss Ozmen said, “there was a stone here over the entrance of this place, and this was the tunnel. Since they were not powerful enough to fight the other people, they were prepared to escape this way.” I tried to climb up the tunnel, bending low and crawling up steps cut by hand into the rock, but the passage soon narrowed so that not even a child could have gone further. When I backed outside, Miss Ozmen was waiting. “The tunnel was destroyed,” she said. “We have a lot of earthquakes.”
Another framed notice, now superseded by the governor’s order, announced that the Roman Catholics said Mass there on the first Sunday of every month at three o’clock. The governor had since reduced this monthly dispensation to once a year. I supposed Antioch’s Christians were not powerful enough to resume weekly services any more than the Emperor Julian, with the might of his legions, was able in the fourth century to restore the old Roman gods to an Antioch which was the capital of Syria and the third greatest city in his empire. By Julian the Apostate’s time, Christianity had taken too strong a hold. By ours, Islam was firmly entrenched. If the Turkish state ever succeeded in supplanting Islam with its national secularism, the mosques might well follow St Peter’s in becoming museums.
Stepping outside to admire the view of Antioch and the plain, I asked Miss Ozmen the name of the district just below us.
“This part is called Habib an-Najjar, because the mountain is called Mount Habib an-Najjar. We have a church, excuse me, a mosque that is called Habib an-Najjar too. It is the name of one of the persons who is regarded as a holy one, according to Muslims. It is a mythological story. They killed Habib an-Najjar on this mountain. The body stayed here, and the head rolled down the mountain.”
“Where to? Can I see it from here?”
“No. It is impossible.”
“Why?”
“It is eight kilometres far.”
If eight kilometres seemed a long way for a head to roll, it was no less fantastic than the account of the Muslim chronicler Dimashki in which Habib an-Najjar walked for three days through Antioch with his head in his right hand proclaiming his love of God. Miss Ozmen took me down to the mosque of Habib an-Najjar in a crowded part of the old city. It was a lovely