Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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the statues will come out of the church and get them.”
We ate the prosciutto, and Father Ferrari ladled out his zuppa of pasta and assorted vegetables, which was delicious. We had begun eating the grilled chicken when Nasra returned from Mass. She sat down to eat, and Father Ferrari began to tease her in Turkish. Barbara gave me an instant translation.
“So, how was the Orthodox Mass?”
“It was fine,” the old woman whispered, dipping into her soup.
“More people than at our Mass, I suppose?”
She nodded.
“It must have been wonderful for you,” he said, a grin coming to his pixie’s face in the candle light. “I suppose that all that power you had in the Orthodox church must have put our electricity out here.”
Nasra ignored him, broke some bread and finished her zuppa in silence. Father Ferrari could not resist continuing. “Nice music, eh, in the Orthodox church?”
She poured herself a glass of water, sniffed at me as I listened to Barbara’s translation and drank.
“Lots of candles, incense and ikons?”
She turned to him and stared. That ended the conversation.
After dinner, Father Ferrari gave us some oranges and made espresso. When he sat down to drink his coffee, he asked me, “I don’t understand how you Americans can drink American coffee.”
“You get used to it.”
“I remember during the war, when the GIs brought their coffee to Italy. I couldn’t believe it. They gave me some, light brown and watery in a big cup, and I just stared at it. ‘Is this coffee,’ I said, ‘or acqua spoca?’”
I was pleased to be spending the feast of the Last Supper in good company with a meal cooked at home by an Italian priest. It was preferable to eating alone in a restaurant, the usual fate of the modern traveller.
In an earlier age, when hospitality was a normal part of life, most of my meals in the Levant would have been in rectories, monasteries or private houses. When hotels were rare or non-existent, the roads were perilous and travellers had yet to become tourists, hospitality was not a luxury. It was a necessity to be reciprocated. When the English traveller Robert Curzon toured the Levant in the 1833 and 1834, later producing a classic work of travel, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, he often stayed in monasteries or at the houses of English consuls. Other foreign visitors stayed with local dignitaries or the nomadic tribes of the desert. It was over a breach of hospitality, when Paris stole the wife of his host Menelaus, that the Trojan War had been fought just north of here.
I walked home in the dark, through the narrow alleyways, down to my hotel. Through a gap in the rooftops, I caught sight of the moon. The electricity had just returned, but the pretty houses of the poor population of the Rich Quarter were dark. It was late, and I imagined all the little children afraid in their beds that the church statues would find them if they misbehaved. I reached the bottom of the Quarter at the Turkish bath and the closed butcher’s shop, and turned into the dimly lit main street, where a few places were open selling grilled meat or coffee, and found my shabby hotel.
So much had happened between the time of the worship of Zeus, Hera and Dionysus, as preserved in the Hatay Museum, and the national secularism of Pölis Bayram and Turizm Bayram – the rise of Christianity and Islam, the rule of Byzantium, of Arabs, of Crusaders, of Mongols and of Ottomans; and the recurring nightmares of religion put to the use of the new conqueror, of religion dividing society and of religion as casus belli. The temples had become churches, the churches had become mosques or museums. Little islands of ancient hospitality, of true Christianity and of devout Islam remained, like strong trees after a storm, to shelter the weary traveller. So much had happened. Nothing had changed.
The old man had a long memory. “The French were bad colonialists,” he said. “In the Ottoman Empire, all peoples – Turks and Arabs, Jews, Muslims and Christians – lived in peace. When France came, it wanted to make a quarrel between them. They made minorities into enemies. They brought a lot of Armenians from Syria. They made them into soldiers and gendarmes. When they left, they took all the Armenians to Lebanon. Twenty-five thousand Armenians emigrated. They divided Syria – Hatay, Alawis in Latakia, Christians in Lebanon, Druze in the south. However many communities there were, they divided.”
He drew an imaginary map of the Levant with his index finger on the coffee-table, then pressed his finger down in the centre, near Beirut. “The quarrel in Lebanon is the result of French colonialism. Syria’s problems too come from the seed of French colonialism. For four hundred years in the times of the Ottomans, there had been no problems with the Alawis. France gave them the idea of having their own state. In Syria, the Alawis are ten per cent. The French gave them the military and other key positions, to use the minority against the majority. All Syrians were merchants and farmers, but the Alawis had the key military posts. Now they rule Syria with their ten per cent.”
Kemal Sehoglu was sixty-seven years old, a Turkish gentleman of the old school. A small, clean shaven, thin man with greying hair, he dressed comfortably in a turtle-neck sweater and tweed jacket. We were at his modern house on the banks of the Orontes in Antioch. He spoke softly in English, but was more comfortable in Turkish, French and Arabic. He suddenly switched to French.
“In the time of my youth, at the lycée, all the young men were opposed to the French occupation. It was our ideal to force them out. For all of us – Arab, Turk, Alawi, Sunni – passive resistance against French occupation went on for twenty years. All the people here wanted to annex to Turkey. There was the Arab minority which wanted to annex to Syria, but Syria had yet to become an independent state.”
Like all Turks, he believed Hatay had always had a Turkish majority. Arabs insisted they had been and remained in the majority. In Lebanon, Christians and Muslims made the same claims for their own communities. In the age of “majority rule”, demography was one key to power. Under the Ottomans, there had been only the rulers and the ruled.
For a year after the 1938 referendum, Kemal Sehoglu explained, Turkey and France maintained a joint administration over the “Republic of Hatay.” “Atatürk made Hatay un pétit état idéal pour tout le Moyen Orient. Because the state was a little artificial, they wanted to annex it to Turkey.”
Kemal Sehoglu was a farmer, who employed Arab and Turkish workers on his lands in the Amiq Plain. We met on my first day in Antioch. His sons had recently returned from universities in North America. Abdallah, whose nickname was Aboush, was twenty- seven and had graduated in 1983 from McGill University in Montreal. Mehmet, whose name was Turkish for Mohammed, was twenty-four and had finished business studies at the University of Denver in 1986. Mehmet looked and sounded like an American, and he was finding it difficult to readjust to life in provincial Antioch. When I asked him how a young man like himself met young women, he answered, “You don’t.” Then he laughed and added, “You forget about it. If you do start seeing someone, you express your intentions.”
“Have you expressed yours?”
“Not yet.”
Both Sehoglu brothers wore blue jeans, Aboush with a corduroy jacket and Mehmet with a pullover. They had picked me up at my hotel, just after I had endured breakfast, and driven me along the river to their house. Built in the 1960s, it was modernist and square, like many houses built at that time on the coast of California. Inside, the ceilings were low and the main rooms adjoined in an open plan, with exposed steps leading upstairs and walls without skirting or cornice. Glass doors at the back faced the garden and the river. They offered me a drink, but I settled for coffee.
Aboush was the heavier, more determined and more conventional brother. He was engaged to be married, had chosen to stay in Antioch to learn the family business and to succeed his father when